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Absolutely, but education for education's sake can easily be provided for cheap or free via MOOCs, continuing education, The Great Courses, or just picking up o

Absolutely, but education for education's sake can easily be provided for cheap or free via MOOCs, continuing education, The Great Courses, or just picking up old books and reading them.

TallGuyShort 9y ago
I agree wholeheartedly - despite how my comment sounds I have very negative feelings on the university system in the U.S. and how overused it is. My father was actually invited by a local youth group to address the kids on the importance of education a few years ago, because they thought he was very well educated. He showed up and informed them that he had dropped out of his third-world country high school and never regretted it, and then he showed the kids a bunch of books on random areas he had enjoyed and told them stories of how he applied that knowledge to various jobs to solve problems, help people, and advance his career. Stuck with me.
ChrisRackauckas 9y ago
These materials stop at a very low level though (undergraduate education). You really can't find canned lectures on many "mildly advanced" topics (even calling upper division undergraduate work "mildly advanced"). It's hard to find someone to ask questions about nonlinear partial differential equations if you get stuck in some book and aren't at a university.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  MOOCs aren't a replacement for university, but a lot of people don't need a full university education in the first place. As I said in another comment, there is not a 1:1 mapping between university and education in either direction. Some people go to university and don't learn as much valuable stuff as they paid for or studied for, and some people learn valuable things without going to university. MOOCs address different needs: a lot of people who go to university and get humanities degrees and then work in non-humanities related fields didn't need a university education, and if they weren't required to do the signaling, could have benefited more by a broader, less in-depth education. Continuing education to keep up with advanced in your field, classes to teach you new skills you're interested in to just discover new things, etc. These are all important parts of an education, and university doesn't do them all that well.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  And if you are asking those questions, then you might personally find a university to be useful! But that does not mean university should be demanded of everyone!

Absolutely, but education for education's sake can easily be provided for cheap or free via MOOCs, continuing education, The Great Courses, or just picking up old books and reading them.

TallGuyShort 9y ago

I agree wholeheartedly - despite how my comment sounds I have very negative feelings on the university system in the U.S. and how overused it is. My father was actually invited by a local youth group to address the kids on the importance of education a few years ago, because they thought he was very well educated. He showed up and informed them that he had dropped out of his third-world country high school and never regretted it, and then he showed the kids a bunch of books on random areas he had enjoyed and told them stories of how he applied that knowledge to various jobs to solve problems, help people, and advance his career. Stuck with me.

ChrisRackauckas 9y ago

These materials stop at a very low level though (undergraduate education). You really can't find canned lectures on many "mildly advanced" topics (even calling upper division undergraduate work "mildly advanced"). It's hard to find someone to ask questions about nonlinear partial differential equations if you get stuck in some book and aren't at a university.

TallGuyShort 9y ago
MOOCs aren't a replacement for university, but a lot of people don't need a full university education in the first place. As I said in another comment, there is not a 1:1 mapping between university and education in either direction. Some people go to university and don't learn as much valuable stuff as they paid for or studied for, and some people learn valuable things without going to university. MOOCs address different needs: a lot of people who go to university and get humanities degrees and then work in non-humanities related fields didn't need a university education, and if they weren't required to do the signaling, could have benefited more by a broader, less in-depth education. Continuing education to keep up with advanced in your field, classes to teach you new skills you're interested in to just discover new things, etc. These are all important parts of an education, and university doesn't do them all that well.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
And if you are asking those questions, then you might personally find a university to be useful! But that does not mean university should be demanded of everyone!