Should Gen Z Go To College?

Alrighty folks, today we're going to talk about whether Gen Z should go to college.

This video is sponsored by Express at VPN.

Well, I think the question is, or do what?

When people ask, should I go to college?

The answer typically should be, what are the options on the table for you?

College isn't a bad option for everybody.

College is a very good option for people who want to go into STEM field, you know, science, tech, engineering, math.

You're not going to learn much about that outside of a solid college.

And the reality is that while we say that we're going to self-educate, there is a portion of of the population that is going to self-educate and doesn't need to actually go to college.

The people who are going to go start startups in Silicon Valley or something.

The vast majority of people do need some sort of intellectual educational structure in order to learn the things that allow them to progress to the next level of their life and their career.

And so doing that in the context of a useful pursuit, sure, college might be good for you.

But for a lot of people who are going to college, the answer is no.

You're racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in order to get a major in sociology or in education, that theoretically you could just get that education elsewhere or go into the workforce.

And the way that college has evolved over the course of time in the United States is quite fascinating.

It used to be that colleges were there not only for the inculcation of job skills, but to make you a good citizen.

If you go back and look at the original statement from, say, King's College, which became Columbia University, it literally said that the goal was to inculcate beliefs in citizenship and religion alongside a secular education so that you could actually become a good citizen citizen and part of your community.

We got rid of that in the early 20th century and we moved toward the job model, which was you don't need sort of a general education.

What you really need more is the education for an actual job.

And by the mid-20th century, that certainly became the way that we thought about college.

And then we moved beyond even that.

And now college is basically some place you go for four years to rack up that drink and sleep around.

And now we've actually moved beyond that where you don't even go there to drink and sleep around.

You go there to watch porn alone in your dorm room.

That seems not like a wonderful progression for college.

So, the question is: what are you gonna do instead?

Well, there used to be these things called apprenticeships in the United States.

And for many people, we're not actually going to college.

They went into an apprenticeship at a firm.

If you want to be a lawyer, you became a law apprentice.

If you wanted to become a blacksmith, you became a blacksmith apprentice.

Well, there's no reason why we shouldn't take high IQ high schoolers and put them in apprenticeship situations.

They'll probably learn more that way than they will in a lot of these college courses.

I have an objection, Ben, if I may.

Okay.

You know, the Trump administration is cracking down like crazy on schools across the country, and there's a reasonable argument that things might change.

Are universities all, you know, fated to be liberal forever and be useless forever?

Or is there an argument that things can really change?

Well, I think that the university's political orientation is less the problem than their orientation toward the job market in general.

And I think that the use of universities to inculcate civic virtue, that's gone for a long time.

I don't see that coming back anytime in the near future, but thanks for stopping by.

That was super weird.

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The truth is that when you hear people arguing in favor of college, they're looking at income trajectories for people who go to college versus people who do not go to college.

The problem is that there are a bunch of confounding factors there.

Like for example, what is the intelligence level of people going to college versus people who don't go to college?

Is that a confound?

Like statistically speaking, is it fair to say that people who get into a college are higher scoring than people who don't get into college?

And the answer there typically is yes.

That doesn't mean people who don't go to college are stupid.

It doesn't mean people who go to college are smart.

It does mean that if those smart people, the guy with a 1600 SAT score, didn't go to college, would he still be successful in life?

The answer is probably yes.

And so you actually have two different statistical categories that are being conflated.

You'll see people conflate all sorts of majors, as though if you major in engineering, that is the same thing as majoring in sociology or lesbian dance theory.

It absolutely is not.

We treat all college degrees from all institutions as the same, which is why you end up with scam colleges popping up where people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to some college or university that earns you a degree that really doesn't pay off in the job market.

There's been all sorts of serious problems with the sort of inflation of degrees and credentialing, which means that a bunch of jobs that didn't used to require a college degree now require a college degree.

If you want to be a barista at Starbucks, you might need a college degree now because every other person you are facing down has a college degree.

I do think we are entering an era where fewer people are going to go to college because I do think AI is going to mess with all of this.

Most people are going to be their intelligence plus AI is going to be the final productivity of their work, which radically changes the equation.

It used to be IQ plus education plus job training equals sort of the outcome.

And now it's going to be IQ plus AI plus job training equals the outcome because the AI is going to replace both part of IQ and also part of education.

And so it's actually going to flatten the job market in some pretty incredible ways.

You'll have people who really outperform, who come up with innovative new things, are able to use AI in innovative new ways.

But there is going to be a broadening and I think deepening of the job market and its availability to a wide variety of people.

Or AI is going to take over entire segments of the economy and everybody's going to be doing manual labor, which is also quite possible because the robots for assisted living facilities are not going to be as cheap and plentiful as the labor available for those.

So that was a very long answer to the question of should you go to college?

But again, it depends on the kind of person you are, what you're going to do with that time.

College is certainly not for everybody, and not every kind of college is for everybody.

And if you are going to go to college, if that's a decision you decide to make, I would recommend very strongly looking at the ideological leaning of the college, whether the education is worth the actual amount of money that you are paying in, whether you ought to go to a startup institution like the University of Austin or check out Hillsdale College.

These are all considerations.

I think everybody wants a sort of one-size-fits-all here.

I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all.