[ExI] the formerly rich and their larvae...

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 02:25:59AM -0500, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> ### Back there in Germany I used to hear about and occasionally meet
> those "ewige Studenten", people who just had too much fun in college
> to ever quit. Heidelberg is so nice, you can sit in Hauptstrasse all

Sounds like a nice enough lifestyle, if you can afford it.
(Doorways in the Sand, anyone?).

> day, go to a concert, meet some new chicks - why ever stop, of
> somebody pays your bills? And why not choose a major that means

Who's paying your bills? Nobody but you. The courses might
be "free" (they're not, at 500 EUR/semester right now, which
a) a good value for the money, but only relatively 
b) will go up soon) but everything else is up to you.

> guaranteed unemployment, like philosophy? Sure, they pay those
> chemical engineering grads up the wazoo, but chemistry is such a bore,

Do they now? There's a considerable disconnect in the local
job market (I happen to track it) and reports about it. 

> so why not do something more enjoyable?
> 
> Salary is a signal of usefulness, and tuition is a signal of sunk
> cost. If your tuition is waived (i.e. somebody else is paying), you
> have no reason to pay heed to the cost, and you have less incentive to
> think about future usefulness. As a result there is misallocation of
> resources - your time and other people's money is spent on activities
> that won't generate a return. Don't they have 10,000 unemployed
> physicians in Germany, because med school is free there? Why does
> Europe have so much post-college unemployment? Seems to me that "free"

Because the job market has gone to shit?

> Hochschulausbildung is in part to blame.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE