>To suggest that low-skill workers are hopeless and cannot improve themselves is paternalistic and insulting.

the question is, though, whether there will be jobs for them even if they do improve themselves. there are lots of over-educated people who end up working menial jobs because there is limited demand for most types of skills. they chose the wrong types of skills and selecting the right types of skills may be increasingly difficult if change continues to accelerate.

I know plenty of people who are incapable of improving themselves.

A lot of people manage to leave the education system without this basic human trait. The scary part is that they had it when they went in.

Who said they haven't improved themselves? Today's low-skilled worker has a BA in English from their state university and lives on Avenue Q.

Don't take any metaphor too far. If you like, a better metaphor: A model-T and a Ford Taurus are equally unable to read. That's not important. What's important is that one is forever, irrevocably obsolete.

Secondary school quality directly varies to the income of the school district. Secondary school is "free" and compulsory. Post-secondary school rates have massively skyrocketed. One needs loans, scholarships, and many other financial aids. If you can afford to live for years on a minimal income (working unskilled jobs) while going to school, you have a chance to graduate. Employers won't hire unless you have a degree.

When education is out of reach for many of us, yes, hopelessness does very well come into play.

Don't make the easy mistake of assuming that school spending is correlated with educational outcomes, there is plenty of evidence that that's not the case. I would suspect that the biggest reasons why educational outcomes tend to be correlated with the income of the school district have to do with culture, parental involvement, and educational levels of the parents. If you grow up in a house of educated folks you are more likely to value education and put effort into it, and you are more likely to be held to a higher standard of achievement in education, regardless of the quality of the education you get.

What are "cheap schools" today are outrageously expensive by the standards when I was young.

The issue here is not whether a second or third tier school can give a decent education, it is whether poor families see school as an option at all. When you combine skyrocketing costs with growing numbers of horror stories of people who are financially destroyed, and cannot even (as when I was young) declare bankruptcy, more and more are going to make the economic decision that they cannot afford higher education.

I am not sure that they are wrong.

What about the massive efficiency improvements in education that are enabled by increasing technology? A while ago an interview with Sebastian Thrum was posted on HN.

The parts of the interview that stuck with me is where he said (I'm going to paraphrase, this isn't an exact quote): "I'm one of the best professors in the world in my field. I can teach a couple thousand students a year, at most, at Stanford. Online I can teach hundreds of thousands [and in theory there is no upper bound on the number of people you can reach online]."

There's a huge amount of inertia in our culture and institutions -- the university system of adult education has been built up worldwide for hundreds of years, so it has a lot of inertia in its sheer mass.

But eventually, anyone anywhere will be able to instantly get the best education in the world on any subject, at essentially zero cost. We're nearly there right now, really; it's just that we're still working on accreditation -- getting "I taught myself on the Internet" to carry the same weight as "I have a university degree in the subject."