On the importance of inflation [UK edition]

[K. A. Pital]

University helps you to develop all-around skills like critical thinking, widen your erudition and the like. Boosting GDP per capita is not the end of all human purpose in life, otherwise man is nothing but a productive resource itself.

[Simon_Jester]

Ultimately, Stas, boosting GDP per capita depends upon having plenty of people with highly developed critical thinking skills and so on- people who want to turn the education system into a factory for specialized drones tend to defeat their own end goals.

At the same time, though, I do think society should be supportive of people who freely choose vocational educations rather than trying to force-fit them into a scheme of education that seeks to make critical thinkers of them. If our methods of educating small children were ideal, it would be easy to make advanced thinkers of all adults. In practice, it can be deeply counterproductive and expensive.

So I'm sensitive to at least one of energie's concerns, while at the same time thinking it's grossly stupid for him to think that relying on modern corporations to train their own workforces is going to work out.

The obvious exploit on the company's part would be to overstate the value of their training, so they can "claim back" a disproportionate amount of money

Leaving aside the fact that universities have an even stronger incentive to do this... wait, why leave that fact aside?

Because a university that exaggerates its costs by 20% is going to lose incoming students to places that don't. Remember markets?

An employer that exaggerates the cost of training an employee so it can "recoup" half their salary by firing them a year later does not lose incoming employees, not to anything like the same degree. I can tell you from experience that workers are a lot less likely to refuse to sign on with a place that has a $10000 "firing penalty" than they are to refuse to go to a university that charges $10000 in excessive tuition.

Setting up a scheme to deliberately defraud people is not just civilly liable, but a criminal offence.

Who said anything about deliberate fraud? All this takes is expensive training, and an industry with an unfortunately high natural turnover rate.

And the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit will never prove otherwise in court.

the problem is that this system will not work as you envision

This is how the economy in fact did work as recently as 30 years ago, at least in my country. In fact I was even offerred money myself for university in exchange for committing to a company, but since university is paid by the government and I didn't need the extra, I turned it down.

Correction:

It works in a labor model where the employee is highly skilled and very inconvenient to replace. Investment banks, for example, pay a high opportunity cost to replace a competent employee- so it is to their advantage to train them, and to make those training offers in good faith. Engineering firms, likewise; medical practices, likewise.

It also works in a labor model where, by custom, the same person keeps working for the same company for a long time. If the company's executives and workers are committed to such a labor model, then there is no incentive to cheat people out of training money, or to skimp on actual training, because the intent is that the worker be retained in the long term. That model prevailed up into the late 20th century in the US, and perhaps longer in other places, but is simply no longer a reality in most of the developed world.

It will therefore NOT work in the unskilled and semi-skilled white and blue collar areas that make up the bulk of the American workforce. If my job could be replaced by any college graduate with a year's clerical experience, then it is *not* likely that the company has a strong incentive to keep me for more than two years, not when they could fire me, recoup a large fraction of my annual salary, and hire someone else who'll be just as good at the job in a couple of months.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

I got a technical (ie. vocational, though not called that) education in university, unlike 80% of attendees. I don't recall giving you my opinion of it.

Anyway, I am not seeing much argument at this point. University is being defended because, I guess, it's cool to say you went to university. Which is of course why people cried so loudly for the subsidies in the first place, not because they read econometric studies claiming it would boost GDP per capita.

No, university is being defended because it is, for various reasons, an important step in the life of millions of people, a place to learn a great multitude of things and a requirement for a large number of well-paying jobs that don't revolve around fries. But okay, whatever makes you feel like a special snowflake.