Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

If it were valuable to you, you wouldn't have had to do it at financial gunpoint. You can see why this might look like cultural Stockholm Syndrome, right?

I do see that. And it might be that. People aren't generally good at isolating deeply held biases in their arguments. But I think that the obligation to show up made me invest time in learning things that turned out to be more valuable than what I would have done otherwise.

Maybe your college experience was non-standard; lecture-style education (and, to a less-evidenced extent, compelled reading) are both so ineffective for long-run retention or model-building that I have a hard time believing that. Do you think you'd pass your final exams now?

For most classes, I def couldn't. But for a few really influential classes, they sparked interests and frameworks that have influenced what I've chosen to read/learn in the 10 years since college. I might do better on those exams now (or that could be accumulated Dunning Kruger).

I'm not downplaying the value of broad exposure to potential interests, but I'd bet there are plenty of less costly/risky means for young people to get that. I also suspect that a lot of people have lost the ability to easily develop interest *at all* due to coercive education.

1/3 Agreed. It's an increasingly inefficient way to acquire useful, relevant knowledge. And many people that acquire the credential acquire none at all. But that still allows for the possibility that the credential still implies something other than IQ and conscientiousness.

2/3 But it only implies something useful when evaluating the full aggregate of entry-level employees. The value in that signal is proportional to the information costs of evaluating an individual. I think you're right that its value is decreasing precipitously.

3/3 But I don't think it's because the absolute amount of useful information signaled is decreasing. I think it's because information costs to assess individual people is decreasing, so the relative value of the credential is plummeting relative to the cost of attaining it.