> I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other.
I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.
Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.
Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).
So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.
I view that today's labor market and education system are interdependent on one another, so I don't think we disagree in that regard.
> Status is always bound to be a scarce good
I think this hits the core of the problem. The REAL problem is that these institutions are more or less made in our image. Many people want prestige, status, power, so people create institutions that have zero-sum dynamics. Some people observe that this is just how the world works and will always work. But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo. I believe we have the capacity to innovate for increased sustainability in our institutions and more importantly our lives.
> But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo.
I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.
Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).
Hmm, perhaps I should have elaborated more, because I never intended to say moral failings alone explains what's going on or even blame certain people. I believe that many institutions and systems created by people exhibit zero-sum dynamics partly because people just don't think there's a viable (competitive) alternative. Amplifying competence signals is certainly one way we could help change that.
I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.
Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.
Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).
So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.