Re: <nettime> conjunctural analysis

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

On 19/Feb/14 21:38, dan@geer.org wrote:

> Tangentially related, this is a rundown of student economics as measured
> by lifetime ROI for the price of tuition (in the US):

Hi Dan --

thanks for bringing this data up tangentially...

but these numbers are verging on fantasy -- I know for my alma mater(s) the 
actual/(even potential) salary data for alumni 10-20-30 years out is extremely 
scarce -- to the point of being statistically very suspect. Those few who are 
actually tracked as alumni (who participate in alumni associations and such) are 
likely to be a more conservative, stable, and perhaps a more 'standard' 
population group. The kind of people who do their (socially proscribed) job to 
get the social rewards of that conservatism. And there is no hint of the other 
market forces (like the rapid contraction of the aerospace sector that 
liquidated tens of thousands of mid-to-late career engineers in the 1970s, and 
in the case of my engineering sector, the extractives industry, which has seen 
huge fluctuations in employment scenarios over the last 30+ years since I 
graduated with my degree). And who knows what the future holds? (College kids 
*DO* know -- unemployment!) Of course, some very very general fuzzy trends might 
be picked up from the data table, but I would say that in reality one standard 
deviation in the numbers could easily +/- 75% of these median values.

Experientially accumulated knowledge-sets -- including learning that is socially 
or personally relevant (itself a hugely subjective question), learning that 
increases the survivability of the individual (or the survivability of the 
species or of the planet), learning that brings personal satisfaction -- are 
certainly sets that seldom fully coincide.

I'm convinced that this statistics set is yet another belated and desperate 
effort to convince a population that a certain (college) knowledge set is 
relevant. I know that many of us who have experience inside this 
knowledge-generation system have come to the sad conclusion that large swaths of 
it are completely irrelevant. It also stands as yet another chunk of data that, 
in the end, emphasizes the complete poverty of ideas that has overcome the 
contemporary techno-social system -- where the market is the sole remaining 
metric of ... everything ...

I have had this discussion with my college-aged son, I must admit, telling him 
he should get a degree (even using the economic argument!), but for his 
generation, data-sets like this represent perhaps just another lie being foisted 
on them by a system in near complete moral and fiscal exhaustion.

Cheers,
jh
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
photographer, media artist, archivist
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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