Stupid ass private education bullshit
It doesn’t.
It takes time and effort to gain more knowledge. It has never been cheaper or more accessible to acquire knowledge than it is today.
To increase your intelligence, is another matter all together.
I would also add that damn near all of human information is free to be had on the internet for the low, low price of a monthly broadband bill. The real expense comes when you want a piece of paper that says you know all this that other people will take seriously.
While absolutely true. I would say it’s much harder to find today than ten years ago. The Internet as an information source is being degraded on a daily basis. The amount of misinformation, ads disguised as information, and AI slop is destroying your ability to find that information.
Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free. You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.
It’s true for infotaiment stuff but for boring knowladge not so much. If you seek textbooks and recordings of lectures, there is still a lot of great stuff out there. It’s boring as ditch water but boring is good.
It doesn’t. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.
I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you’ll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you’re familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.
I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.
Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.
Or in some cases, like FOSS, the knowledge is freely available, but you pay for a detailed course or tutorial to receive that information in a simpler, more streamlined way.
A lot of the time I paid to have it taught to me so badly that I would have been better off with a textbook. 😢
They then call me up once every few years to ask for a donation! Fk off, I’m still paying off the loan!
Exactly. Smarter doesn’t equate well educated.
Yuuuup. Piece of paper literally to get a higher paying job. Only says you attended school, doesn’t mean you learned anything or built skills there.
It doesn’t benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
also competing with the rich for high paying jobs too. thats why its gatekept. like AMA, AND MANY graduate level jobs.
The library is free, my dude
Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.
It is wild to me that tuition is SO expensive and quality educational content is SO ubiquitous now. It does take a lot of time, skill, and effort to provide quality educational experiences, but man is it weird that it is simultaneously free and ridiculously overpriced.
University is overpriced, but a degree isn’t just saying that you’ve gained knowledge. Being able to look up and memorize stuff doesn’t mean you’ll be good employee. if you can’t work effectively with a team or tend not to finish a project all the knowledge in the world means nothing.
The most important thing most degrees demonstrate is that you can work for years on a project with multiple milestones involving multiple disciplines, work with others or self-direct, and meet goals.
alot of people fall into the trap of easy degree, like psychology, a studies/arts degree. yea you arnt going anywhere with a psych degree, if your not academically preparing for grad school like PSY-D, or psychology doctorate. i witnessed quite a few people that got a degree, and then complain about it. i had a cousin that did her psych degree properly, she has a PSY-D a while a go.
there is a suggestion going around in other forums,communities, that schools should start holding talks or seminars about different majors, and thier job prospects, but we know they wouldnt, because it would scare people away from these degrees that are money makers and coporations can abuse/exploit low wages for many fields.
Yes, agreed. Definitely value there. I feel like a huge part of university is demonstrating the ability to learn and apply oneself. So many people have success (like myself) in areas that they did not major in.
One thing that I think is actually an argument for big state schools vs private, more expensive lib arts schools is that the big state schools provide you skills in navigating “a System” and that does help when you get into the real world and the damn corporate rat race. Smaller liberal art schools might have more academic competition maybe, but less bureaucratic competition, in many cases. In many cases bureaucratic navigation skills, which are often more valuable in job applicants IRL.
Most impressive are folks that have gathered both the book smarts and the world navigation smarts without the need of higher education institutions and carved their path without going into huge debt or getting carried by rich parents who paid for their degree.
we had a bunch of gifted students in HS, or high performing, i believe we only had 1 gifted per semester/class. they were “paraded around” the school like they were best of the school, while at the same time neglecting the underperfoming struggling students, which is quite a large part of the student body.
our state schools in the wests, apparently were suffering from enrollment deficiencies so they decided to raise tuition (equivalent to dorms), covid exposed unmasked the problem with the schools thats been ongoing before the pandemic. basically people were graduating in the early-mid or late pandemic and they dint learn anything or dint have a chance to get any experience, so they all but criticized the schools, and probably warned thier family hs students away from university.
as of recently the state universities started to enticing hs students of early easier admissions, if they complete these x amount of courses. I dint follow up if the tuition is higher for these students as well. Some students criticized these state school, transferred to a more prestigious university for better opportunities. what universities need to do for stem is increasing the resources for LAB WORK, like make opportunities for more lap spaces,etc, this is the most important part of a major.
In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.
Education is now one of Australia’s main exports.
same in US, most of them seek out international rich students, and you can see how much of these from the middle east and asian coming in with thier expensive cars to campus everyday. at the same time they neglect the rest of the students, so they dont prepare them for thier career track as there is very little resources directing to the departments, just enough to get by so the Professors and staff dont “revolt”, they also abuse the adjunct positions to avoid paying them full time, or more benefits, if they can replace all the instructors with masters or BS level educations they would instead of getting PHDs. it all goes to wooeing international students, and sports. stem needs lab work as experience, but its so limited and small most graduating dont even know about it, or its extremely hard to get into. you can tell the university is being cheap if they use overworked professors to do advising.
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it’s a fucking valuable activity.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We’ve had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire “help” session you provide.
We’ve had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don’t work. OK let’s see your system and go through the steps. Let’s check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn’t do step one, because it said I didn’t have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro… why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you’ll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
I’ve been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.
Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school’s attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You’re de facto assumed smart if you’re in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.
Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers.
I’ve taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don’t really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)
When people say that higher grades don’t make you successful, many don’t realize that that probably means students who sacrificed their performance on school assessments to challenge themselves, work on personal projects and gain experience rather than trying to get a perfect assessment score in school. A portfolio is more important than grades when it comes to applying for jobs.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn’t be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn’t do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don’t have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
I’m not talking just about “heavily needed jobs.” I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they’re being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It’ll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the “job qualification” part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
A quality education teaches how yo learn which applies to absolutely every single job that exists. Yes, even the simple ones like basic labor.
I guess you’re talking about the US.
Well, everything costs money there: education, health, safety… It’s capitalist dystopia.
It doesn’t if you know how to read. I don’t think of college as paying to learn; it’s paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won’t have a degree proving it.
This about a thousand times.
I can only guess he is asking why it is expensive to get the degrees, and that’s a fair point.
I’m old enough now to know I could be a Dr. Something with my knowledge and experience but would just have to put in massive time to get it recognized. Since I can’t gain much* with that, screw it.
*aside from social bragging rights and rl title which is about worth as much as in games (I am against titles how did you guess? - not against diplomas and certificates, mind.)
Oh and before I forget: learning - depending on field - can be done by hands on and experiencing or simply pondering yourself, that’s free too. Too few people do that and only rely on preprocessed knowledge.
Valve made me stop giving a shit about college when someone (I cant remember if it was Vince or Gabe) said they are much more likely to hire someone who has self taught themselves and made something to show for it than a college grad with nothing to show but a degree.
I really wanna work there 😮💨
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they’re racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn’t a white christian republican.
There’s more detail but that’s the short version.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90’s. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn’t have to pay a dollar >:(
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
For what its worth, you can sit in on most if not all lectures, without paying. Tutorials, exams and the fancy robe and paper cost, but to sit and listen to the lectures is free at all unis. Some caveats apply regarding crowding, but generally you can acquire knowledge for free.
The boomers, goat generation of pulling the ladder up behind them!
So that’s why the USA is the primary source of monetised knowledge. Fwiw I fully support pirating educational media, because if many countries of the world can access a significant amount of education for free, everyone should have the same chance, regardless of how the government of the locale wants to rule and restrict it.
I support fair wages for those who deliver publicly available services at material cost only or lower, so I support taxation that finances it and minimum wage regulation. Even though I believe the current minimum wage in the West isn’t sufficiently regulated. It needs to triple in order to catch up to the ‘inflation’, or the perceived monetary value of everything.
Can you elaborate? I’ve never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you’re wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don’t actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn’t sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can’t.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved
Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students… Anyone who wasn’t a WASP with wealthy parents.
George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn’t qualify for UTexas.
It doesn’t. It costs money to get the diploma that’s proof of your smarts. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz didn’t actually get a brain, he got a diploma.
My son is a committed cinephile, and has systematically watched nearly every movie ever made, in any country, in any era ( it seems). He’s an expert, by anyone’s estimation. He just started back to college for a degree in Film Studies, because while he has the knowledge, in order to get a job teaching film, or working in an archive, etc., he needs the degree.
So you aren’t buying the knowledge, any person who makes a serious commitment can get the knowledge, you are paying for an organization ( a school) to endorse your knowledge. Kind of a Certificate of Authenticity for your intelligence.
There are a lot more quality free learning resources than people realise.
Honestly, there isn’t hardly anything you couldn’t learn on your own. But what higher education provides is structure. It can be very difficult to actually follow through with the education if you do not have scheduled classes, exams you have to study for, deadlines for projects/exams, etc
One of the reasons some branches of learning are called “disciplines”
depends on the subject, math, engineering, stem need school, plus you cant really do experiments/ or lab work/procedures at home.
It only costs money to get the little piece of paper that says you did the thing and are therefore smarter. 🙃
Disclaimer: I 100% support “free” healthcare and “free” education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We’ve not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as “free” is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it’s something we all have to collectively fund.
Free to the user… Are you just trying to muddy this water?
Not at all.
By calling for education and healthcare to be free, you’re voluntarily giving ammunition to politicians that they can use to sway low-information voters.
If every person who supported public education and public healthcare stopped calling it free right now, the people against these public services would still call them free. Because they want it to sound like people are trying to get something for nothing. They like it when we call it free.
Calling something free just conforms to the narrative that education and healthcare are something you would have to pay for in the first place. Why would you ever have to pay for a basic human right?
Idno man, that’s sounds like a very America brained argument. When people say free healthcare they don’t mean we should have self sustaining health slaves colony to heal us up for no money. Obviously it’s going to cost tax money if it’s not directly billing the consumer.
Public healthcare also doesn’t mean free healthcare. In Iceland it’s subsidised 90% with a wax payment of like $200 monthly or something so it’s not free, but it is public. You can also have free but private
