abstractapplic's Shortform

abstractapplic

This is a special post for quick takes by abstractapplic. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

There's an upside of conventional education which no-one on any side of any debate ever seems to bring up, but which was a major benefit (possibly the major benefit) of my post-primary studies. Namely: it lets students discover what they have a natural aptitude for (or lack thereof) relative to a representative peer group. The most valuable things I learned in my Engineering courses at university were:

.I'm pretty mediocre at Engineering, especially sub-subjects which aren't strictly Structural and/or Mechanical.

.In particular, I'm significantly worse than the average would-be Engineer at working with electronics, so I should change my plans to specialize in that field.

.Conversely, I'm significantly better than the average would-be Engineer at work involving code, money, probability, simulation and inference. (Learning this is a large part of why I eventually left Engineering for Data Science and Finance.)

Findings like this aren't perfect since they can give false negatives (a poorly-taught course can lead someone to conclude they don't like the subject when they actually don't like the teacher) and false positives (my initial showing at coding courses made me think I had a genius-level talent for programming; turns out I actually just have a genius-level talent for beginner programming, and much of my lead evaporates when doing anything nontrivial); also, there's no hard reason they can't also be found in the workforce (if people joined companies at the same time as two dozen similarly-aged and -educated peers with whom they were frequently compared, they'd get this benefit while being paid^[1]). Still, I think it's an undervalued and underdiscussed output of our current educational paradigm.

^{^}
Soldiers get this, but I'm not thinking of that kind of company.

4Garrett Baker1y

Why is college a particularly better place to learn this than on-the-job training?

Lower switching costs when you're in the middle of a degree, maybe? You can just take courses in a closely related domain, or work as an assistant in a different lab, in a much more fluid and straightforward manner, versus having to apply to a different job and get through the interviews and pay a significant upfront cost before you even get to the nuts and bolts of stuff.

11Garrett Baker1y

This seems like a mischaracterization of his view. I’m pretty sure he thinks its wrong to subsidize such signaling mechanisms. First off signaling is relative, so if (say) everyone goes to high school and only the very best go to college, from a signaling perspective, this is just as useful a signal as everyone going to college and only the very best go to grad school. Therefore we should not spend public dollars getting more people to go to college. Second, in the signaling framework, there are no externalities to schooling kids, so there is no market failing to correct with (say) the government subsidizing the debts of college students. Third, due to the first point, if any major market failure is present its the tendency to get into signaling spirals, where the positive signal of (say) a high school education degrades over time, making everyone spend more years and dollars in college getting what was once the same signal as a high school diploma. More years of schooling here is a cost, which everyone would prefer to pay less of. So insofar as there’s any case for government involvement it ought to be a tax, not a subsidy.

abstractapplic's Shortform

6

abstractapplic's Shortform

6