The value of education

I can't decide which article in the Herald today shat me off more. Was it Our degrees don't repay their cost or Wanted: inquiring minds or Our degrees are not paying? My mental jury is out, but I think cranking Bob Jones' blathering opinion as if it's a story does take the cake.



The annoying part is that I generally agree with all three stories, in technical detail. It's pretty clear that tertiary education has a long term financial payoff that has devalued as tertiary education has become so pervasive. Coupled with the high cost of actually putting oneself through it, of course the pay-off is not as huge as it once was. What is annoying is that the articles have so little contextualization. It's not noted, for instance, that the problem with NZ degrees might not be the degrees, but the weak NZ economy. No other value of the tertiary training is considered than the purely financial aspects.

Even then, the conclusion is that actually the degrees do pay off, that they do, across the average lifetime, make more money than the degrees cost. "Little net effect" might be insignificant to a statistician, but an extra $30,000 across one's life, coupled with the opportunity to participate in higher education, is still a highly rational choice. Certainly no mention is made of that idea that people might have actually enjoyed getting their qualifications as goods in themselves, or that having a very large number of people with extensive training might have been good for the nation in non-economic ways.

Bob Jones is annoying mostly because he just has no skin in the game. It's easy to tell people not to get a technical degree, but to go study history instead, when you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than facing the dole queue with a big student loan, during the longest recession in 80 years. Just because he personally might hire one out of every ten thousand history graduates (to do what? He never says) doesn't really make a compelling case. He really doesn't have any useful ideas. I remember him trotting that shit out in the mid 90s, about how he'd rather hire a philosophy graduate, right at the time I couldn't find any work whatsoever with that exact qualification. Computer science, on the other hand, has kept me in decent money for 20 years. So much for the anecdata.

The level of sophistication in Herald columns on education is appalling. They get better writing in their outraged commentary. There's something I can't put my finger on - a smugness perhaps? It seems to be a rag catering to insecure middle-aged-to-old people, stroking their anxieties to sell fat copy.