r/economy

My neighborhood is usually bustling with decorations for the holidays. Now, only about 10% of the homes are decorated. Guess it’s a sign of the troubling economy.

This isn't to say that poor people shouldn't go to college, but the subsidization of their ability to has spiraled them into debt and made jobs more scarce.

For all but a few highly technical degrees, usually those requiring certification, college served as a gatekeeping tool to ration the limited number of white collar jobs to families with generational wealth, which is why back in the day a kids "college fund" was so important.

For any job except those requiring a certification or license, you could theoretically teach yourself, college just standardized that teaching and mitigated risk for employers in hiring the wrong person.

When abundant student loans entered the picture, there is no more filter so at first we end up with too many qualified persons pushing wages down.

Then the colleges of course get greedy and want more student loan moan so they lower admission standards.

Previously a college had incentive to keep admission standards high because people paid top dollar for their name because employers recognized their name. If they let in a scrub they risked an employer hiring them and attributing their lack of ability to their school, thus lowering its prestige and what people would be willing to pay for it. There were also a limited number of people able to pay that prestige price.

Colleges no longer have that pressure, and its arguably more profitable to take mediocre students in for their student loan money than it is to be selective and command top dollar from a wealthy few.

This race to the bottom academically combined with an oversupply of graduates has made it a lot harder to actually get a job. College is no longer a gatekeeper its a minimum requirement and it no longer guarantees a job due to oversupply.

At the same time because its a minimum requirement everyone goes into more debt just to get the same relative inflation adjusted level of income a high school education got them 30 years ago, and the government guarantee of student loan money means the schools can raise tuition without pushback.

I don't really know of a solution to this, it sucks. I think the masters has become the new bachelor's and bachelor's is the new high school diploma. The problem with that is that due to academic standards dropping, a bachelor's degree really isn't much more rigorous now than high school previously was so today we simply go 30 to 60k into debt for a level of education that used to be free.

There is so much wealth but no real cash. People max out credits for necessities as well as non essentials. Do we have a rough path ahead?

I’ve been thinking about a question that seems more important than “CS or Business?”

If AI keeps getting cheaper and better at processing information, writing code, analyzing data, and doing other types of knowledge work, what will actually become scarce?

Maybe the valuable skill won’t be knowing how to do something. Maybe it will be knowing what is worth doing in the first place.

Things like judgment, choosing the right problems, creativity, taste, trust, relationships, execution, and taking responsibility for real-world outcomes could become more important.

But I’m not sure this is the right way to think about it either. AI might make some things scarce that we don’t even recognize yet.

So I’m curious:

If AI makes intelligence and information increasingly cheap, what do you think will become more valuable or more scarce over the next 10–20 years?