Master’s is the New Bachelor’s
Over the past several years, I’ve heard a lot of people bemoan the fact that so many people are going to college today. They say things like “if college is so expensive, maybe you shouldn’t go.” This misses the big picture and is fueled by propaganda trying to downplay the need for increased funding for tuition assistance. This was a trend that was easily predictable, and will only continue. The quicker we can realize that, over time, more people will need to go to college, the quicker we can start to address how to accommodate it, and prevent further negative economic side effects.
To start, let’s look at a diagram depicting human knowledge. Everyone starts as just a dot at the center, and can expand out in any direction by learning new things. Different directions denote different subjects, and the more you learn, the farther out you grow. Around the starting point, we can draw a boundary for all required knowledge to be a fully-functioning adult. Things like arithmetic, reading, grammar, basic civics, fundamentals of science, and social norms would all fall inside that boundary. Outside of that boundary, we can draw another boundary that someone needs to reach in order to make money based on their knowledge (that last part is important, as very little knowledge is needed for menial jobs, but most people strive for more than that). Finally, outside of that boundary, we can draw the limit of what humans currently understand. Here’s an example:
This is of course a schematic, so the exact shape is irrelevant, but I did intentionally make the boundaries non-circular. This is because different fields of study vary in how much we know and how much one needs to know to function/make money.
At a minimum, primary education should cover everything in the inner region, and ideally should exceed that. Some form of secondary education is then usually needed to reach the monetization boundary. The amount of secondary education depends on the field and the objective. Here’s an possible example of someone’s knowledge through an entire academic career:
As you can see, the growth becomes more concentrated as the education level gets higher. This is necessary because humans have accumulated so much knowledge up to this point, that there is nowhere near enough time for someone to learn all of it. This also explains why we don’t see any Leonardo da Vinci-type polymaths today: in the past, it was easier to be an expert in any given field, since we didn’t have as much cumulative knowledge, so it was easier to become an expert in multiple fields. To this effect, the key point to make with these diagrams is that the outer two boundaries are constantly moving outwards, and at an accelerating rate, thanks to advancements in technology and knowledge:
As these boundaries move out, people need more education just to provide value to society beyond what machines can do. A mechanical engineer of today learns all the concepts that were taught a century ago, and also learns computer programming, computer-assisted design software, stress analysis software, fluid flow & heat transfer simulation software, and some electrical engineering. Technology affects some fields faster than others, but it does make its way into nearly all fields eventually: think about how few job options someone would have today if they didn’t know how to use a computer.
The advances in technology/knowledge don’t even necessarily need to require much additional learning to have an impact. For example, say a new technology came along that took 5 minutes to learn, but made people twice as efficient. With that, the industry impacted would only need half the workforce, and now suddenly you need to be in the upper 50% of workers in that industry in order to make money, pushing the boundary out further. The 5 minutes is not the driver of that push, but rather the competition is the driver. On top of this, competition also rises as the population rises.
The increased competition also makes it easier for colleges to pull off astronomical tuition hikes: more people want to go to college, so the demand for college is up, which means you can charge higher prices. That makes this issue even more urgent.
With all this in mind, it’s clear that, over time, any given level of education will become less sufficient, which will lead to more and more people pursuing higher degrees. Framed and handled the right way, this can actually be a good thing. The mechanism that leads to this is our economy becoming increasingly efficient through technology. As technology becomes better, we need fewer people to produce the same amount. Another effect this mechanism could and should have is that it allows humans to spend more time in school bettering themselves, since they’re not needed as urgently in the workforce. If this happened, the population would be more well-educated, which makes for a stronger society. Unfortunately, our current system won’t allow this to happen because of higher education costs.
Before finishing, I should address two arguments I would expect to hear for why college isn’t that important:
There are cases where people break the mold and make plenty of money without higher education, e.g. Bill Gates: Most entrepreneurs that succeed without going to college had simply already reached the threshold for monetization on their own. Those, and quirkier cases, like social media influencers, are rare, and it would be foolish to have our economic system depend on masses of people being able to do that.
More people should go into a trade rather than going to college: This is a good option for some, and the US even has a shortage of skilled blue collar workers right now. However, it’s hardly a surprise that Millennials/Gen Z were reluctant to go into trades when they grew up seeing entire communities across the country devastated by manufacturing jobs moving overseas or being eliminated entirely by automation. When I was in high school, deciding on a career path, I considered ‘likelihood to be automated’ to be one of my main criteria. I likely wouldn’t have ended up in a trade school even without that criterion, and perhaps being someone who ultimately ended up in engineering meant I was predisposed to think about the possibility of job automation, but I know I wasn’t alone. As a high school senior, you have about 50 years until typical retirement age. A lot can change in 50 years, especially with the rate of technological advancement continually accelerating. Given that blue collar jobs are typically more easily automated than white collar jobs, pushing students toward college more than trade school seems wise long-term, even if it seems excessive currently.
Path Forward
As stated, higher education costs are causing this trend to be a negative one rather than a positive one. We should acknowledge that a master’s is becoming the new bachelor’s and that undergrad should be treated more like high school as time goes on. This means more funding to public schools to reduce tuition and increase capacity. In a future post, I will provide a more direct argument for why everyone, and not just people with student loans, should support this.
