Finally! Higher education is not the end-all-be-all

Even though I'm just weeks away from getting my Master's degree, I think this article totally hits the spot:

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.

Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.

We're convincing too many of our children that higher education is the path they have to take to be successful at anything, we're burdening them with tremendous debt loads to buy into the system, and we've decided that going to college is the solution for all that ails us in terms of poverty and inequity for disadvantaged communities. I think higher education has a purpose and can be very valuable - but I also know that I got the most value out of it when I went back to school at 25, at which point I had worked and supported myself for several years and had a much better sense of who I was and what I wanted out of college. We need to recognize and support that there are a much wider range of alternatives for a fulfilling life, and that many of them don't require going to college at 18 - if ever.

This similar article by the same author who posted the above interview with Peter Thiel also discusses why higher education is not the safe route to success that we all keep telling ourselves it is. Here, he quotes Paul Krugman:

The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, non-manual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

Finally, I feel validated, as I've been arguing for years that pushing kids into college just because everyone says that's the thing to do isn't a particularly good idea. If The Economist says so, I must be right! I'd also like to note that I was arguing something similar about the push to an "ownership society" in housing well before 2008. Maybe I should become a predictor of bubbles?