Well, then we should start thinking about focusing on the study areas which indeed produce human capital. There are still far too many academic studies today that bring little or no benefit to the economy, where graduates hardly find jobs and instead increase social costs. As long as we don't do that, it doesn't matter if someone is still studying and doing a doctorate at 66. At least then they will already have an old-age pension and will not have to draw unemployment benefit or social assistance.
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If economic benefit is all that matters to educational resources, you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians, who rarely produce anything useful in the same generation. Yet what they do might bring massive new technologies or other improvements to society decades later. You can make the same argument about lots of degrees. Value to society is rarely obvious. Steve Jobs audited a class in calligraphy which seems utterly useless, let it lead to the Mac and the importance of fonts and graphics in computers in general.
> Value to society is rarely obvious
It's rather obvious. There are even offices that collect the relevant statistical data.
> you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians
No. Both disciplines are required by a lot of companies today. If you have a look at www.indeed.com there are currently 3.5k jobs for physicists. There are subjects where there might be a dozen jobs per year per thousand graduates. But engineers are missing everywhere.
There's lots of mathematical and physics research with clear near or mid-term applications - a good example is DARPA grants, which are motivated by specific government needs, and which "feed" many mathematicians and physicists.
YSK that there are numerous ways to contribute to society beyond formal work to acquire fungible currency.
If you want to make a contribution to the development of vaccines or remedies, or to medical care, then you simply need to study accordingly. I agree with you that it is an undesirable development that nowadays everybody wants to study, no matter what, or preferably something where you can get a bachelor's degree with little effort. On the other hand, there is an increasing lack of qualified, experienced professionals, such as those needed in nursing or in the construction industry. If I need someone to repair my heating system today, I have to wait a long time and pay a lot. And through my taxes I pay at the same time to the many unemployed historians and social scientists.
I doubt very much that there’s causation between senior citizens getting degrees and a lack of specialized professionals. Things rarely work that way. I’d be glad to pay for unemployed historians and social scientists, they enrich our intelectual culture and help shape my country. I’d be even happier if they got jobs of course.
Go up to the comment of gbronner to which I responded. If people are bothered by the fact that retirees study and do their doctorates, they should ask themselves the questions I have asked. I think it's good if pensioners keep themselves busy in a meaningful way, as long as it doesn't put an additional burden on society. Imagine how much society benefits when pensioners use their time to study cell metabolism and use the vast amount of data available to discover connections and mechanisms that lead to new antibiotics or other useful drugs instead of being bored and spending the rest of their lives in front of the television. And unlike you, I don't think it makes any sense at all to let people study stuff that primarily costs society, both for the study and for the subsequent maintenance of these people. Enrichting the intelectual culture is good, but for this we do not need the legions of historians, publicists, media scientists or philosophers, or other fields of study whose sole purpose seems to be to create offspring of their own kind.
> whose sole purpose seems to be to create offspring of their own kind
That’s absolutely not their sole purpose.
The graduates of the above mentioned studies I know of work at the academy of their field, or in the administration and help expand the state administration and bureaucracy.
That sounds like a very small and likely very biased sample of people from those fields.
It seems to me that what you learned about these graduates says a lot about these graduates.
And someone must take care of state bureaucracy anyway.
My comment was independent of study area. A 66 year old woman has a life expectancy of perhaps 18 years, but an expected labor force participation of only a few years.
It is difficult to start a PhD worthy job in a new field at 66, as there's still a lot of domain specific learning (in the private sector), and most companies don't want to commit to making that investment in someone likely to voluntary retire, or quit due to health issues.
So, instead of working for 6 years, she got a very expensive degree that society is unlikely to benefit from, as there's often no way to apply these skills in the economy
> My comment was independent of study area
Sure. But you complain that resources are wasted when retirees go to college and get their doctorates. I replied that resources are already being wasted on a large scale when there are academic studies that generate more economic costs than benefits. I have clarified my position in my further comments if you are interested.