The Wastefulness of Higher Education
Here's one example of wastefulness in higher education, with comparison to more frugal options.
Society has made a number of expensive mistakes in this regard:
* Pressuring everyone into college runs up the dropout rate, because not everyone is actually an academic, and it causes degree inflation such that people currently working with a high school or bachelor's degree must be replaced by someone with a master's or Ph.D. A bachelor's degree has become the equivalent of a high school diploma but costs ruinous amounts of money to obtain.
* Splurging on things like stadiums makes it more expensive to attend college and drains money from actual education that college is supposed to be about.
* The bigger and fancier colleges get, the less people respect smaller schools, other ways of learning, or practical skills. It becomes a sham, all about having a snazzy piece of paper from some yah-rah institution, rather than about what work a person can actually accomplish.
* So kids look at this and think it's a bunch of bullshit, which it is. Very expensive bullshit that is ruining a lot of lives. Then they think adults are stupid to push them into this heap of bullshit, which is also true.
* But society has turned college into a means test for survival. Without a college degree, it's all but impossible to get a job that might pay enough to live on -- if you're permitted to have a job at all, and if there's anything left after paying the loansharks. When they claim that college raises income, ask who gets that money. Increasingly, it is not the graduates, but the loansharks.
* That runs up the rate of anxiety, depression, suicide, and other problems among youth in their teens and twenties. Then society whines that something is wrong with kids these days. You want to blame someone, blame the deciders.
* On the other hand, we have the internet. You can find almost all information known to humanity on there, and a majority of it is free. Very, very few subjects require or benefit greatly from facetime interaction -- things like music and linguistics and physical therapy. Even those can be studied somewhat from books, videos, online articles, etc. Most subjects, you can learn as much as you want online with similar quality as in class. Frankly I've learned far more, better, faster, with higher quality materials on my own than stuck in a room with a bunch of dumbasses and a teacher who thinks the shit textbook is accurate.
* Take away the requirement of facetime teaching, and what you're left with is college as a place to socialize, which is how a lot of students already seem to use it. But is four years worth of partying worth hocking the rest of your life? Probably not.
Sooner or later, the college bubble is going to burst. It has to, because the cost of college has long since exceeded its value, the current situation is ruining a lot of lives, which undermines the functionality of society as a whole, and it's rapidly heading toward a point where most people won't be able to afford it at all no matter what they try or what the claimed rewards are.
If you want to help deal with the mess, there's one thing everyone can do: stop treating college degrees as a requirement for life in society. Instead, ask whether a person can do a given job. If they can, hire them for it. If not, don't, go find someone better. It won't stop the coming collapse, but at least you won't be ethically responsible for contributing to it.
I like knowledge, I really do. But America's education system has turned into a shark tank. >_< I can't condone that.
Society has made a number of expensive mistakes in this regard:
* Pressuring everyone into college runs up the dropout rate, because not everyone is actually an academic, and it causes degree inflation such that people currently working with a high school or bachelor's degree must be replaced by someone with a master's or Ph.D. A bachelor's degree has become the equivalent of a high school diploma but costs ruinous amounts of money to obtain.
* Splurging on things like stadiums makes it more expensive to attend college and drains money from actual education that college is supposed to be about.
* The bigger and fancier colleges get, the less people respect smaller schools, other ways of learning, or practical skills. It becomes a sham, all about having a snazzy piece of paper from some yah-rah institution, rather than about what work a person can actually accomplish.
* So kids look at this and think it's a bunch of bullshit, which it is. Very expensive bullshit that is ruining a lot of lives. Then they think adults are stupid to push them into this heap of bullshit, which is also true.
* But society has turned college into a means test for survival. Without a college degree, it's all but impossible to get a job that might pay enough to live on -- if you're permitted to have a job at all, and if there's anything left after paying the loansharks. When they claim that college raises income, ask who gets that money. Increasingly, it is not the graduates, but the loansharks.
* That runs up the rate of anxiety, depression, suicide, and other problems among youth in their teens and twenties. Then society whines that something is wrong with kids these days. You want to blame someone, blame the deciders.
* On the other hand, we have the internet. You can find almost all information known to humanity on there, and a majority of it is free. Very, very few subjects require or benefit greatly from facetime interaction -- things like music and linguistics and physical therapy. Even those can be studied somewhat from books, videos, online articles, etc. Most subjects, you can learn as much as you want online with similar quality as in class. Frankly I've learned far more, better, faster, with higher quality materials on my own than stuck in a room with a bunch of dumbasses and a teacher who thinks the shit textbook is accurate.
* Take away the requirement of facetime teaching, and what you're left with is college as a place to socialize, which is how a lot of students already seem to use it. But is four years worth of partying worth hocking the rest of your life? Probably not.
Sooner or later, the college bubble is going to burst. It has to, because the cost of college has long since exceeded its value, the current situation is ruining a lot of lives, which undermines the functionality of society as a whole, and it's rapidly heading toward a point where most people won't be able to afford it at all no matter what they try or what the claimed rewards are.
If you want to help deal with the mess, there's one thing everyone can do: stop treating college degrees as a requirement for life in society. Instead, ask whether a person can do a given job. If they can, hire them for it. If not, don't, go find someone better. It won't stop the coming collapse, but at least you won't be ethically responsible for contributing to it.
I like knowledge, I really do. But America's education system has turned into a shark tank. >_< I can't condone that.