I’m not gonna argue that it’s precisely a wash, but I’m not aware of any country without political factions who strongly oppose each other and think the country would be much better if everyone else would just get on board. What can sometimes be true is that multiparty systems make the hardness of problems more legible; if you have 5 different parties with 5 different perspectives on how the education system ought to work, it’s a lot less tempting to think that one perspective is unambiguously correct and it’s only The System that’s stopping us from following it.
The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
>The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
We can change this however to "we know that massively cheeper or free college to anyone in the appropriate high school track is better" and it becomes true.
Not necessarily. It's still possible there are confounding factors that led to it's success, unknown to all implementers and observers. Maybe there are other pre-requisites to the success of the implemented education system.
We still know not having millions of people in debt out of university, and not giving millions of others the possibility to even go into university without big spending, is not good - confounding factors or not.
How do we know that a university degree isn't primarily a signalling mechanism? That would make universal university incredibly wasteful of people's most energetic years.
Because people don't just learn to be doctors, physistics, biologists, structural and civic engineers, chemists, and countless of other professions on their own (not in any significant nunber after the 18th century at least), they learn it in university, with a structured curriculum, theoritical tuition, supervision, labs, and so on.
The vast majority of people with degrees will not use that degree in their job. I certainly didn't and looking at my fellow physics or maths grads the same is true of almost all of them.
Not sure what part one wont use. The degree as in "the printed paper"?
Because I guarantee that the "vast majority of people with degrees" in the professions I described and many more, will use the knowledge acquired during their degree in their jobs.
I'm not sure what physics or maths grad doesn't use the math he was taught/practiced/and picked up during his tutoring for the degree.
The implication is that they learn those things before going to university? Or that they learn them in grad school? (as if studying for graduate school is not also university, and as if the prior knowledge acquired during their BSc and such wasn't necessary to understand what they encountered in grad school -- and to have a basic understanding of their field).
> Because I guarantee that the "vast majority of people with degrees" in the professions I described and many more, will use the knowledge acquired during their degree in their jobs.
I agree with this, but think the jobs that use degrees are a small minority. Maybe 20%?
> I'm not sure what physics or maths grad doesn't use the math he was taught/practiced/and picked up during his tutoring for the degree.
I'm a software engineer atm and while I have done some gnarly stuff with directed graphs, I don't think I've used any of my uni maths in my career. A friend of mine went to be an actuary, same thing, A-level maths was used but nothing beyond that. Catastrophe modeller? Same. Civil servant? Same. Hedge fund analyst? Same.
Very very few jobs actually require graduate level maths.
The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.