Surfer is definitely a funny dude. I like his posts. It is like TV. Not rational and not logical. Kind of reminds me of Jack Hershey.
Good post, and a bunch of interesting thoughts. Personally I have been skeptical of the value of college experiences. When people are spending $150k and four years on a communications or liberal arts major, it is not clear to me that this represents an efficient use of resources for either the individual or society. However, I acknowledge, as you stated, that the intangible benefits of college are difficult to measure. All in all, despite a moderate shift in thinking over the past few years, I think that most of society still greatly value the college experience. Perhaps some are not as religiously devoted to the idea that one needs to go to college to be successful as in the past, but this healthy dose of skepticism may be a good thing. Also, I view colleges as generally inefficient allocators of capital, which annoys me me particularly because I view my job as an investor and efficient allocator of capital. At NYU, I saw security guards get paid six figures for simply checking student IDs, or how they remodeled their buildings every few years, all paid for by college tuitions that rose 10% every year. They are able to do this because demand is largely price inelastic, and that there is no incentive for management to be cost efficient. (I do acknowledge that NYU, as a higher end institution, may not be representative of a broader range of colleges, but I suspect this type of inefficiency exists to some degree at other schools as well.) Still, I realize that despite its flaws, the higher education system we have in place today is, on the balance, beneficial to society.
Great points, all of them. I agree, there has to be an equilibrium price somewhere, and costs as they currently stand seem too high, yet demand is still climbing (partly due to the fact that median real wages haven't risen in over 40 years, so there's some desperation built into maintaining middle class standards of living). I'm also on the same page about how management has no incentive to be cost-efficient as a result. I had the same experience seeing the amount of money going into the facilities/environment where I studied. It was off-putting. Although if you went to NYU, I've heard how egregiously that particular university takes students' money. Some <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/forum-on-higher-education-costs-0208.html">interesting research</a> behind the value of higher education: "Instead, Autor said, the best evidence shows that a college degree leads to a lifetime earnings increase of $250,000 to $300,000, even after subtracting the cost of higher education. Those returns, Autor noted, apply to graduates regardless of their undergraduate majors: Humanities students benefit just as science, engineering or business students do."
unconventional idea, but you wouldn't trust one of these teenagers to perform brain surgery on you! Bill Gates wasn't smart enough to design operating system for MSFT, he bought it from someone else. Bill Gates "stroke of genius" was his ability to see the application of a fairly new field at the time (the use of computer), and he was in the game early. he had the vision. you bet there're thousand of PhD's working for him to do those technical stuff that he himself can't overcome. If these teenagers can come up with billion dollars idea like cell phone (as an example or drug that can cure cancer), then can they deliver? no, because they don't have the technical know-how to do it. even Steve Jobs alone couldn't; he relies on a team of experts who know about physics, chemistry, electronics, computer science... As you know it, it takes years of researches from PhDs and engineers to design the electronic circuits and software algorithms that would work on cell phone.... the growth of technology is a evolutionary process. it doesn't happen overnight. it takes alot of researches, study, training, and testing from many people in different fields.... I think what these teenagers can come up with would be worthed for several episodes of the "Shark Tank" show on ABC.
That's alright but at what point do we consider the experience a success? Let's say he picks 20 teenagers, how many of them have to become bona fide success to call this test valid? Not to mention, a 20 persons sample could be statistically invalid anyway.... So the result (whatever it will be) can be skewed in both directions. And how many years are we supposed to wait for the results? Maybe in 20 years whoever became successful would have been successful without Thiel anyway... So questions for Thiel: 1. What is a statistically valid sample size in this kind of experience? 2. What is the selection process? Is it random? (that would be very interesting) If not random, what are the requirements? 3. Is there a control group (also selected, or randomized) to see how they succeed WITH college degrees? Unless we can compare it to a similar sample, the results might be very skewed, or irrelevant. 4. How long is the experience supposed to last, at what point in time can we call them a success or a failure? 5. The unanswered question will be: how these kids could have done with the college degree... Just these few things suddenly coming to my mind, I am sure there are some more....
@Samara: It's good to see quality posters on this board once in a while. I tried to quote your posts but it would look too verbose, though I assure you that I read through all of them. I don't understand why there are so many posts measuring the cost of college education as $10^5. You guys are Americans; I might not be in university now, but I am young enough to recall on retrospect that there is aid-blind admissions and countless programs and scholarships to subsidize your tuition. I wasn't a citizen when I came over for college, but my entire college tuition and board was still paid for, against a ridiculously low international admissions rate. I did struggle with the living expenses in MA but those expenses were well worthwhile even if you only calculated the tangible costs that I recovered from the college: There was free lunch and dinner every single day so long as you signed up for events. All the cookies, cakes, pizza, coffee to full-course sushi dinner and outdoor Korean BBQ. And they made sure there were more things you could do than time you had. Those expenses went to things I used: a clean corridor and bathroom each day (which says a lot, because college kids are the most disgusting lot ever), one of the largest libraries in the world (it was large enough that some people practically converted parts of the stacks into their permanent living space), free Bloomberg terminals, 30 years of historical data including all fundamental factors from another vendor, one of the fastest internet networks in the whole of US. They paid for my international flight expenses four times (a conference, a competition, internship out of US, and a community service program), reimbursed between $500-$1,000 for admission and hotel board for every conference that I attended out of state. A few lasted 4 days while we stayed at 4/5-star hotels. We had 6-hour-long math competitions each year and inbetween our professors would bring us out for the best dinner I've had, all paid for by the university. They subsidized our living expenses even when we were being paid for by our employers. Even graduate students were given the freedom to run their research programs out of state/USA, get paid fully for their summers, and given the autonomy to pay fully for other students' costs if they enrolled in the said program. And the scope of "research" was very wide: one guy bought a big house in a rural area, wired it up with internet and clean water, furnished it and converted it into a center where my schoolmates would congregate over the summer to think of energy solutions. Of the research articles I've read, about 1/5 of them weren't available for free but my university's certificate gave us access anyway - 600 papers, $30 each, that would be about $18,000. You could do all of the above even as a liberal arts major. If you went into Amherst/Williams/Wellesley you'd probably enjoy similar privileges in a cohort of 100% liberal arts majors. And several of my friends received Rhodes and Goldwater scholarships. A generation or two before me, they were in the Forbes list. But they also went to jail for accounting frauds. And especially from the science side for graduate students, you were only about as good as 1/5 of your thesis advisor and 4/5 of the other people you spent time with - so the leading researchers in the fields were all cultivated by the university, not merely of their own drive. On either end, they were equipped with the skill set and connections to elicit huge changes to our society. Take it this way: you need drive to take full use of the opportunities in university; of which there are countless more than those available outside. But if you have none of the qualities for success, then whatever opportunities are thrown at you, you'd still squander them. Inefficient spending? Maybe. But I definitely got the better end of the deal and I want my kids to have more than what I enjoyed. Despite all this, they still had labs (and some of these were run by the top groups in their fields) that were running old 667 MHz P3s and took forever to boot Win XP, as recently as last year. So long as such travesty still exists in this world, our universities deserve much more attention than the thrashing it gets from douchebags like Thiel. P.S.: I agree with the balanced argument in the rest of your post; my post is not directly in response to you, just in response to anyone who believes a college education costs $150k+.
I agree with Peter Thiel concerning his experiment and I get vilified as not being rational or logical? I am compared to Jack Hershey? Man, thats harsh!
The anti college people make four arguments: 1. Everyone goes to crazy expensive third tier private colleges without scholarships. 2. The five billionaires who didn't go to college prove its a waste of time. 3. They cite the example of a frat boy who wasted his four years drinking as the college experience for everyone. 4. Everyone studies Mesopotamian pottery and thus can't find a job.
So we're decided that Peter Thiel, a guy who's net worth is more than the combined nw of every member in this thread, is an idiot.... Well done.