What is the value of a University education? To the individual, and to society as a whole?

[Which Tyler]

Just starting a new thread, as this is far more of an international question than a UK political one.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Which Tyler

[James Arryn]

Well, it has at least served as a nice punching bag for conservatives since…conservatism.

 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/11/why-conservative-intellectuals-are-anti-intellectual

[Heartofice]

Moving on from the UK thread I'd ask a couple of questions:
 

• Is it necessary to have a university degree to start a job in an office, doing admin, doing any number of middling white collar jobs? Why as a society have we pushed the requirements for jobs like this to include 'good' degrees. Is this in part because grades in secondary education have continued to go up and up to the point where its harder to differentiate candidates, and so you need another layer of education to create any sort of hierarchy. I'm seeing this extended with more people doing Masters and MBAs and working in jobs that you could easily do with just a secondary education. 
  
   
• A point that keeps getting made is that there is some sort of non financial benefit to going to university that cannot be quantified. I'd want to know what these so called benefits are, whether they are actually the product of going to University or simply a correlation of not being from a poor working class background or not being 'the sort of person who goes to university'. Also, why can these benefits only be found within University, what is it about going to university that provides these benefits? Is it all the social clubs.. living with your mates, going out on the piss all week? 
  
  I've often seen it said that Uni teaches you discipline and the ability to look critically at information, but how is it that people are able to leave secondary education without already attaining these skills, to even get into Uni you'd need to be able to do that already. It's very chicken and egg.
   
• Clearly there are some benefits to going to university, there is financial gain for 'some', if you pick the right course and are already on that pathway. My whole point has been that there huge over extension of university education, combined with a massive upscaling of the necessary qualifications needed for even menial jobs has been an entirely unnecessary change and not beneficial. 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Heartofice

[mormont]

The answer to the original question varies very much according to which 'society' we're talking about. A developed Western society? Or a developing country? Treating it as an 'international' question is difficult because the answers vary quite a bit internationally. 

[House Balstroko]

It’s important to distinguish between value to an individual vs value to a society. If an individual wishes to make a living as a Twitch streamer, then a college degree isn’t exactly necessary. On the other hand, modern society would have a hard time functioning without people pursuing STEM degrees. 

[baxus]

As someone from STEM field (Electrical Engineering officially, but Computer Sciences), I can say that university degree helped me out a lot, even though all the knowledge I've acquired in university can be found elsewhere, with less hassle. University degree is basically a stamp that confirms I know certain stuff* and not much more than that, but a degree (and knowledge it verifies) is not the only worthy thing you get at college. You get challenged mentally, you improve your work ethic, you meet people with similar interests, you create a network of friends and colleagues etc. If someone already has all that covered, then I'd advise against spending 4 years (or more) in university.

Long story short, university education is important, but universities are not the only places where knowledge can be obtained. Placing too much importance on degrees is just as bad as diminishing their importance.

*There are types of "certain stuff" that require that stamp, though. I doubt anyone would want to have a surgery from a guy who saw a YouTube tutorial  

[Rippounet]

Quote

A point that keeps getting made is that there is some sort of non financial benefit to going to university that cannot be quantified. I'd want to know what these so called benefits are,

I'd personally distinguish between different kind of degrees (STEM/humanities... etc) but in a nutshell, college education is certain to give you one thing: broader perspective.

Broader perspective has several key benefits:
- It limits alienation. Believe it or not, research has shown that humans don't take well to being used as mere tools by other humans. Being trained for a job is not enough: perspective is a psychological requirement. Of course, perspective and balance can be acquired by other means (personnal reflection, hobbies...), but that takes a bit more time and effort, especially once you're working full-time.
- Flexibility. Presumably someone who has received generic education about a field can more easily switch from one sub-field to another.
- Critical thinking. You may acquire the rudiments of critical thinking in high school or thanks to your parents, but college is supposed to give you enough perspective to develop that ability much further.

Quote

I've often seen it said that Uni teaches you discipline and the ability to look critically at information, but how is it that people are able to leave secondary education without already attaining these skills,

Critical thinking isn't a 0/1 binary thing, it's a skill that takes a lifetime to develop. Quite obviously.

Quote

I'd want to know what these so called benefits are, whether they are actually the product of going to University or simply a correlation of not being from a poor working class background or not being 'the sort of person who goes to university'.

This kind of point is utterly baffling to me, because it takes something which is in fact a problem (college education being correlated with social class) and gets the wrong conclusion from it (requiring college education to get a good/managerial job is a problem).
Honestly, this is very anglo-saxon. And from a French perspective it's objectively absolutely fucking stupid. Obviously, the actual problem is having to pay for education in the first place. You want to bring society as a whole up, not down.

We know what kind of society you get when education is a privilege: we've had those up to the 19th century. Now I know both the US and the UK love to get ever so closer to the 19th century with every conservative electoral victory, but this is where a bit of critical thinking and historical perspective is pretty damn useful.
You really don't want a society in which education is a privilege. Education, information, skills... the whole combination you get through higher education can be summed up in one word: power. Without education your social mobility is limited, your political impact even more so. You're a peasant, you're a tool, a blip on the map that will never gain true autonomy or agency.
Imho you only have to look at the US to see what making education a privilege achieves: the end of class consciousness and the slow degradation of the concept of the common good in favor of entertainment politics.
And no, quite obviously, access to information (through the internet, or a library) isn't enough, or we wouldn't have flat-earther and anti-vax groups on facebook. Quite obviously, you need someone (i.e. a teacher) to guide you through the steps.

So how has it come to this situation where working-class folks are so easily tempted by anti-intellectualism? Well, beyond the fuckery of conservative politicians, David Graeber touches upon it in Bullshit Jobs and some of his Guardian columns. Once education becomes expensive, it mechanically becomes a reflection of class hierarchy. The middle-class and upper-middle-class, seeking to reproduce their social success, will use education as a barrier to mid-level corporate jobs or "management." And yet, as Graeber points out, many of these jobs are actually useless ; or rather, their only purpose is to reflect the social hierarchy. It's no surprise then, that working class folks will come to hate not just their useless managers, but also the intellectual justification for their existence.
And yet again, it is the wrong approach. It is not by making education more difficult to access that you overcome class divides: it is by making it free and easy to access. By that I mean that even free tuition isn't enough to guarantee social mobility and genuine meritocracy (as we can see in France, alas): working-class kids should receive extra help and incentives to get a college education and reach managerial jobs, as well as political office. The core idea isn't that you get a college education because you are smart but that you become smarter when you are educated. That's why education should always be a right, and never a privilege.

And beyond the spectre of class warfare, the whole point is to know what kind of society we/you want. A society in which individuals can only acquire the knowledge and the skills to perform their job is a dystopia. And the environmental crisis makes it a stupid dystopia, because the productivism that results of such a view of society must now end.
At a glance, you'd think degrees that don't directly train you for a job are useless. From a humanist perspective however, they may be the only degrees that are useful. Because humans shouldn't exist merely to work, but to have a chance at appreciating and valuing the experience of the human condition and the joys of social relations, the depth of self-reflection, or the emotions coming from aesthetism (to give a few examples of what makes life actually worth living), having a few years as a youngster to actually work on social relations, self-reflection, or just the mere enjoyment of your senses and emotions... is barely enough. Potentially, this isn't about discipline but about spirituality, without which human societies are likely to doom themselves.

This is how one can only conclude that the anti-intellectual movement is now stupid on several levels: not only is it a disguised form of class warfare (let the rich only have access to college), but it's also a war against humanity itself, both as an ideal (humanism) and as a species (through productivism/consumerism).
If you're rich, it makes sense to adopt a relatively anti-intellectual stance, because what you're really saying is that you don't want the lower classes to be educated. But if you're poor, or just middle-class, an anti-intellectual stance is a glaring display of a lack of critical thinking.
 

[Heartofice]

35 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It limits alienation. Believe it or not, research has shown that humans don't take well to being used as mere tools by other humans. Being trained for a job is not enough: perspective is a psychological requirement. Of course, perspective and balance can be acquired by other means (personnal reflection, hobbies...), but that takes a bit more time and effort, especially once you're working full-time.

I'm not sure why perspective and balance cannot be found in the workplace. I know you are a hardcore commie which is why you think having a job means you are being used as a mere tool, but yeah I really don't buy the idea that you get more perspective and balance by doing a university degree. What is the evidence for that? I think you are just pulling this out of thin air. 

37 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

- Flexibility. Presumably someone who has received generic education about a field can more easily switch from one sub-field to another.

Well it depends on the field, and then also assuming that you end up working in some sort of vaguely related field. But what if your degree is in something so utterly generic that it has no relationship to your future career. If you took philosophy does that make you more prepared for many jobs or are you actually far less prepared and cannot easily switch to anything. 

40 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

- Critical thinking. You may acquire the rudiments of critical thinking in high school or thanks to your parents, but college is supposed to give you enough perspective to develop that ability much further.

Again to my point, is there anything specific about critical thinking that it can only be acquired in uni? I don't think so and if you don't have those skills already you'd do very badly at uni. As you say it's a lifetime skill, and you can get it from many sources. 

42 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Honestly, this is very anglo-saxon. And from a French perspective it's objectively absolutely fucking stupid. Obviously, the actual problem is having to pay for education in the first place. You want to bring society as a whole up, not down.

Well of course it's anglo saxon, this whole thread is an extension of UK politics discussion and I'm English. Again I think you are missing the point, the question which you completely failed to answer is whether university education should be a prerequisite for any number of very middling white collar jobs, because that is very much the case in the UK at this moment. 

[maarsen]

Since I graduated in 1978, with an arts degree, I have seen study after study showing that grads with an arts degree tend to be more successful in their careers over those that have specialized degrees. An arts degree gives you a broader scope of knowledge than a specialist degree. An engineer designing a bridge does not do do in isolation but needs to work in a social setting and also needs to understand the possible uses of a bridge, apart from carrying traffic. 

[Ser Reptitious]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

You want to bring society as a whole up, not down.

Great post in general @Rippounet, but I think the above especially gets to the heart of the matter. Upper-class conservatives of course have no interest at all in lifting up society as a whole. Having 'peasants' with critical thinking skills is the last thing they want. Quite the opposite. Most of society consisting of mindless drones, utterly dependent on their betters, is very much the goal. 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

It has value, if you want it to, and if you put in the work.

But the value is diminishing, in no small part because of the Club Resort business model of universities. Students are treated more like customers to be pleased, because the exec administration wants them to keep paying those exorbitant tuition fees. As such, the quality of education that a degree reflects is rather uncertain, though that probably varies depending on the field. As more and more people go through the higher education system and end up with degrees, having a degree loses its value for employment prospects as well. Still worth it, overall, but less so.

[Gorn]

On 5/16/2023 at 7:10 AM, Heartofice said:

Moving on from the UK thread I'd ask a couple of questions:
 

• Is it necessary to have a university degree to start a job in an office, doing admin, doing any number of middling white collar jobs? Why as a society have we pushed the requirements for jobs like this to include 'good' degrees. Is this in part because grades in secondary education have continued to go up and up to the point where its harder to differentiate candidates, and so you need another layer of education to create any sort of hierarchy. I'm seeing this extended with more people doing Masters and MBAs and working in jobs that you could easily do with just a secondary education.

An easy answer to this is that as the sum of human knowledge grows, the time necessary for a young person to accumulate enough knowledge to be on peer-level with white-collar professionals also grows.

A major difference between university and secondary education (in my experience) is that in university, a far greater emphasis is placed on researching and seeking knowledge on your own, instead of being guided by the hand to stuff that you need to learn if you want to pass tests. And most jobs, unless you are doing very repetitive mechanical job such as working on an assembly line, will require you to research things and be creative with problem solving.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Gorn said:

And most jobs, unless you are doing very repetitive mechanical job such as working on an assembly line, will require you to research things and be creative with problem solving.

Which suggests you could equally learn those skills on the job right?

[Gorn]

4 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Which suggests you could equally learn those skills on the job right?

That merely switches the burden on the companies into forcing them to keep mostly unproductive and dead-weight employees on their payroll for 6-12 months, with no guarantees they will stay in their jobs once they actually become productive. It also further decreases productivity by forcing more experienced colleagues to spend time on tutoring instead of doing other work they are supposed to be doing.

Which in turn discourages them from hiring young people, increasing youth unemployment and making it more difficult to get the first job.

Edited May 17, 2023 by Gorn

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Gorn said:

That merely switches the burden on the companies into forcing them to keep mostly unproductive and dead-weight employees on their payroll for 6-12 months, with no guarantees they will stay in their jobs once they actually become productive. Which in turn discourages them from hiring young people, increasing youth unemployment and making it more difficult to get the first job.

Firstly there is a risk with every single hire, especially young people with no on the job experience. Companies will always need to train inexperienced staff, it’s an investment.

Why spend 3-4 years learning to be self sufficient in a uni when you can do it whilst getting paid and also learning relevant on the job skills. Seems to me to be a far better investment to get someone in early and train them in a more relevant way. 

[Gorn]

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Firstly there is a risk with every single hire, especially young people with no on the job experience. Companies will always need to train inexperienced staff, it’s an investment.

Companies have made the financial calculation and determined that the risk is lesser and their investment is lower if they require a university diploma for new hires. As longer as there is a sufficient quantity of graduates in the job market, it is a no-brainer from an employer's perspective.

[BigFatCoward]

My wife did a degree in TV production, she works in TV production in a  relatively high level role. She is adamant she could teach someone more in 3 months than she learned in 3 years at uni. She said she hasn't used a single thing she learnt and the only reason to do it is you struggle to get a low level job/for in the door without it, that's not a good reason for 50 grand debt. 

She has discussed if/when she starts her own company she will have paid interns for a year to avoid them getting saddled with debt for no reason. 

[Rippounet]

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I'm not sure why perspective and balance cannot be found in the workplace.

If you're at least middle-management and/or highly qualified, you're not too overworked (meaning you don't always pull more than 40h/week), have a decent salary, and your personal life is satisfying/gratifying, sure, you may find perspective and balance in the workplace.
Which is what, about 10% of the population? 20% maybe?
You're probably part of that percentage though.

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I know you are a hardcore commie

I'm certainly hardcore something.

Man, I do respect you for having the courage to go against the wind here on this forum, but sometimes you make it hard, y'know? Your latest contributions have been a bunch of simplistic conservative talking points that you barely understand.

Like when yesterday you basically said that the British government should help/encourage couples have kids so as not to rely on an immigrant workforce? And that some of those kids shouldn't even go to college in order to have more kids?
Did you even realize that such a combination of social conservatism, xenophobia, and illiberalism can only be seen as far-right discourse?

Technically speaking, for all my bluster, most of my positions are rooted in traditional French socialism, which was common when I started forming political opinions sometime around the end of the 1990s, which was always quite close to traditional British socialism. I haven't really moved on the spectrum in thirty years, as all roads have brought me back to where I started. Conservatives like you are the ones who moved, to the right. Hysteria about centralized European bureaucracy? Obsession with immigration and refugees? Renewed focus on traditional family values and attacks against LGBTQ+ individuals? And now, attacks against higher education and/or universities? Not to mention the common violence in words and deeds, the omnipresent and shameless corruption and greed...
It's a global movement that is observed in most developed countries, if not all countries full stop. Conservatives of all ilks are embracing far-right positions. The "left"' has its flaws, for sure, but you are flirting with the devil.

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

you think having a job means you are being used as a mere tool,

Only if your job has no social utility. That was, again, the point of Graeber's Bullshit jobs.
Both the Covid pandemic and the environmental crisis are driving this point home. Hard. One doesn't need to be a "hardcore commie" to know that some jobs are inherently useless or even harmful to society, and thus not rewarding (or even soul-destroying), just as one doesn't need to be a psychologist to know that socializing and sharing is otoh necessary for humans in order to find psychic balance. In the wake of the pandemic and lockdowns, countless people in developed societies have struggled with these very basic facts, with shrinks and doctors having to deal with the growing population of people having realized that the dominant ideology they get through the media is a steaming pile of horseshit, and how meaningless and absurd the consumer society has become. We're now getting not just numbers, but also studies, analyses, books, and even fiction based on all this. Have you even noticed?

I'd say the huge problem with many conservatives is that they refuse (or are incapable) of acknowledging these facts, so they will stoop to some empty name-calling: "leftist," "socialist," or "commie." The reality is that you no longer have any clue, you're at least twenty years late in a world that's moving fast, and you still think that being "communist" is somehow bad in a world that's starting to burn because of the excesses of unregulated capitalism. It would be funny if it wasn't tragic.

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well it depends on the field, and then also assuming that you end up working in some sort of vaguely related field. But what if your degree is in something so utterly generic that it has no relationship to your future career. If you took philosophy does that make you more prepared for many jobs or are you actually far less prepared and cannot easily switch to anything.

You're focused on jobs and work. The point of philosophy isn't to prepare you for work, it is to prepare you for life.

I had philosophy in my last year of high school despite being in a STEM-oriented program. I learned so much that year: the basics of truth and morality, what liberty, conscience, or justice really are, concepts like Plato's cavern or Marx's alienation... Maybe I had a good teacher, or maybe I was more curious than most, but I got more from that one year of philosophy than from any other class I ever attended. Was is useful to do my job, then or now? Of course not. It was useful to be a free and autonomous human being, to start trying to understand what it means to be human!

How the fuck could the tools to become actually free and autonomous not be a right for every single kid in a developed society? How could a minimal amount of individual empowerment not be a basic objective?
Well, maybe there is one socio-economic class that would work against this... ? Wonder why, uh?
 

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Again to my point, is there anything specific about critical thinking that it can only be acquired in uni? I don't think so and if you don't have those skills already you'd do very badly at uni. As you say it's a lifetime skill, and you can get it from many sources.

Of course you can get it from other sources. But if we want to help young people develop those skills at the moment in their life when it's most useful and important, might as well have an institution that is tasked with the specific duty of helping people between the ages of 18 to 25 (roughly speaking) hone these skills.

We could call that institution a "university" and have people specially trained to teach young people there. Access to that "university" would be a basic right of course, to promote genuine meritocracy in society.
Wouldn't that be grand, uh? Too bad the Tory fucks in your country decided educating the plebs wasn't cool. Though if it can make you feel any better, the neo-liberal fucks in mine have the very same ideas. What a curious coincidence, uh?

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Again I think you are missing the point, the question which you completely failed to answer is whether university education should be a prerequisite for any number of very middling white collar jobs, because that is very much the case in the UK at this moment.

I actually gave several answers to that "question," you just didn't like or got them. The good thing about a forum though, is that you can easily re-read what I wrote. If you can set your ego aside, that is.

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Companies have made the financial calculation and determined that the risk is lesser and their investment is lower if they require a university diploma for new hires. As longer as there is a sufficient quantity of graduates in the job market, it is a no-brainer from an employer's perspective.

This goes back to my earlier point. We've pushed the ceiling for qualifications far above where it needs to be. Getting secondary education now is not sufficient to even get a job answering phones in an office and making the tea. That is probably a byproduct of decades of elevated results where the numbers of kids getting top grades keeps going up and up. 
 

[Gorn]

Just now, Heartofice said:

This goes back to my earlier point. We've pushed the ceiling for qualifications far above where it needs to be. Getting secondary education now is not sufficient to even get a job answering phones in an office and making the tea. That is probably a byproduct of decades of elevated results where the numbers of kids getting top grades keeps going up and up. 
 

You may not like it, but this is how capitalism works. Even if you view university education as purely job training (which I don't), it makes no sense for employers not to ask for a university degree from their hires, and those who don't will be punished by the market.