[Puffer Fish]

Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of Paypal, has some interesting thoughts to share on the economy and education.

here's a transcript of part of the speech he gave at the Intelligence Squared U.S. Foundation

"And the law school context I'm familar with. There's about 50,000 people a year who graduate from law school in the U.S. There only are 30,000 legal jobs available in the U.S., and I would argue we have maybe too many lawyers as is, but we're producing way more for a society that already has too many. The median wage for lawyers is 62,000, which isn't that great considering that you've taken on a quarter million in law school debt typically.
Pre-med. There are only about 9 percent of the people who study pre-med have slots available to them in medical school. The other 91% are wasting their time. And somebody should have told them that their freshman or sophomore year. And not waited to their senior year, or post-college, to figure that stuff out.
If you broaden the ambit more generally, there's something like 17 million people in the labor force who have college degrees and are basically doing unskilled work. Or sort of the - you'll find narrow and extreme statistics, like 6100 people in the U.S. who have PhDs and are doing janitorial work."​


you can find the video on YouTube
Too Many Kids Go To College, IntelligenceSquared Debates, Oct 28, 2011, 11:30 into the video

With globalization, many of the manufacturing jobs that HS grads used to be able to get are gone forever, and employers are looking for the kinds of cognitive skills we associate with college graduates.

"Throughout the '90s I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount, we should only hire people who went to the best schools, and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal, and I thought this was the most important thing in our society."

We are experiencing something of a bubble in education. (...) It is characterized by two things: 1) runaway costs, and 2) an incredible psycho-social dynamic where you cannot question it. This is the one thing people still really believe in our society.

"We need to figure out, how do we create more jobs, how do we create more good-paying jobs, we don't have enough of either in our society. While education is linked to them, it's not this absolute thing. What we want to question is that education is an absolute good, or an absolute necessity."
​
Peter Thiel of PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Founder's Fund - My Thoughts on Various Topics - Confluence (atlassian.net), Nathan Wailes

[Potemkin]

You cannot magically create well-paid jobs just by educating people to a higher standard to enable them to do well-paid jobs. This is magical thinking rather than rational thinking. Has he only just worked this out?