7 ms·

I consider myself a liberal, and i agree with the point that college is net detrimental to society. It makes people waste their best years, teaches them mainly,

I consider myself a liberal, and i agree with the point that college is net detrimental to society. It makes people waste their best years, teaches them mainly, useless stuff, barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings, and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should. This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors. It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college having little chance to make anything out of it.

ehsankia 5y ago
Worth noting that Ivy League costing hundreds of thousands is quite different from college too. Also, the major matters heavily. In something like computer science, you may be able to get by fine without a degree, but good luck becoming a doctor or lawyer with an online education.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work. I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.
- otterley 5y ago
  > I can find a competent plumber trivially. You must not live in any major U.S. coastal city. Plumbers and other skilled tradespeople are in extremely high demand right now.
  - Domenic_S 5y ago
    To say nothing of _competent_ ones. It is a great deal of work to find a tradesperson that is 1) available and 2) competent. Unsurprisingly the most available ones seem to be the least competent.
  - briffle 5y ago
    If you look, most trades limit the number of new students they will accept for apprentiship programs. Even if everyone suddenly wanted to be a plumber (or electrictian, etc) they can't get into the programs that will allow them to become certified. Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers. yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.
- icelancer 5y ago
  >> I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work. This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.
- anovikov 5y ago
  But incredible cost is because of the inflated demand. Too many people go to college who don't need it. Reduce demand by, pun intended, educating people that they don't need college unless they can make it to the top, and prices will fall.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Needing it is defined by employers considering them as base qualifications
- dijit 5y ago
  > I can find a competent plumber trivially. I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates. Most are self-employed. (UK).
otterley 5y ago
I largely agree with the sentiment that we need more plumbers than liberal arts graduates. One answer, though, is "why not be both?" Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.
- panzagl 5y ago
  > And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit. Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.
  - warkdarrior 5y ago
    Which "both sides" denigrate college? Last I checked some progressive Democrats wanted to make college free, not denigrate it.
    - panzagl 5y ago
      The question is do they want to produce more nurses and web developers, or more informed citizens. I believe the emphasis is on the former.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  It absolutely is taught in secondary education in the US. Heck, it's taught during elementary education. But you can't teach someone something unless they're willing to learn it. Post-secondary education doesn't help that.
  - otterley 5y ago
    Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.
parineum 5y ago
> It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it. Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.
xvector 5y ago
> makes people waste their best years I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sli 5y ago
The whole "college = liberal arts majors" is a wildly reductive argument and is extremely common among the types that OP is referring to. It's pretty disheartening to see it repeated here.
- dijit 5y ago
  Do you have any actual numbers on BA vs BC (or BA vs BSc)? There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    > it is overrepresented Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields. Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    > I think it is overrepresented in universities What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular. I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better. Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not). [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4 http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4
- anovikov 5y ago
  People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
I found college had a net positive effect on me. It gave me a great deal of discipline and the helped me develop important critical thinking skills. Though I did a mix of STEM and economics, I can't vouch for other degrees. Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends. It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.
teachrdan 5y ago
> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below: "Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma." But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades. I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair. This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/collegepayoff.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
- inside65 5y ago
  I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing. Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start. Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.
  - teachrdan 5y ago
    By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things. This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter. I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.
prions 5y ago
Youre underestimating the value of a college degree. Research like [1] shows that degree holders have significantly more lifetime earnings than high school. You also miss how the democratization of education has benefited our society and helped lift millions out of subsistence lifestyles and class lock-in. "This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors" This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale. 1. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Many in the tech community turn exclusively to technology to solve every problem. It doesn’t occur to such people that e.g. sociologists, who study problems of society as a discipline, have any answers whatsoever to our problems as a society. To them, sociology is just another useless liberal arts degree without job prospects. In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    But I did listen to sociologists when I took a distribution requirement in college. I'll never do it again. It was 80% totally obvious facts about human behavior that don't need to be taught and 20% totally contrived BS. No science going on there.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      So you took 1 intro class into a subject and determined the entire field is worthless? Do you apply this decision-making process to other aspects of your life? Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be. To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.
abvdasker 5y ago
The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college: > When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat). I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
We'd need to significantly improve high schools before considering eliminating college. Let's face it. We can't expect American high schools to teach students anything about the world. We've had schools try to spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World. We've had attempts to show "both sides" of the Holocaust. And yes, college isn't perfect at teaching liberal arts, but it's better than not learning at all. I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art? Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years. I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  > spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World That's not spin. That's exactly what the slave trade was.
  - hardwaregeek 5y ago
    I'd firmly disagree. Workers has an implication of voluntary, paid work. There's a reason we have a specific word for unpaid, non-voluntary work. Not to mention slavery extended beyond work. Being a slave was not only backbreaking unpaid labor, but also a whole host of horrors outside work such as rape, family separation, forced breeding, torture, etc. Calling slaves "workers" is a deeply inaccurate categorization. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-rev...
tfehring 5y ago
> makes people waste their best years What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway. > teaches them mainly, useless stuff Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless. > barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree. > and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.

ehsankia 5y ago

Worth noting that Ivy League costing hundreds of thousands is quite different from college too. Also, the major matters heavily. In something like computer science, you may be able to get by fine without a degree, but good luck becoming a doctor or lawyer with an online education.

drzaiusapelord 5y ago

I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work. I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.

otterley 5y ago
> I can find a competent plumber trivially. You must not live in any major U.S. coastal city. Plumbers and other skilled tradespeople are in extremely high demand right now.
- Domenic_S 5y ago
  To say nothing of _competent_ ones. It is a great deal of work to find a tradesperson that is 1) available and 2) competent. Unsurprisingly the most available ones seem to be the least competent.
- briffle 5y ago
  If you look, most trades limit the number of new students they will accept for apprentiship programs. Even if everyone suddenly wanted to be a plumber (or electrictian, etc) they can't get into the programs that will allow them to become certified. Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers. yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.
icelancer 5y ago
>> I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work. This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.
anovikov 5y ago
But incredible cost is because of the inflated demand. Too many people go to college who don't need it. Reduce demand by, pun intended, educating people that they don't need college unless they can make it to the top, and prices will fall.
- 8note 5y ago
  Needing it is defined by employers considering them as base qualifications
dijit 5y ago
> I can find a competent plumber trivially. I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates. Most are self-employed. (UK).

otterley 5y ago

I largely agree with the sentiment that we need more plumbers than liberal arts graduates. One answer, though, is "why not be both?" Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.

panzagl 5y ago
> And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit. Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  Which "both sides" denigrate college? Last I checked some progressive Democrats wanted to make college free, not denigrate it.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    The question is do they want to produce more nurses and web developers, or more informed citizens. I believe the emphasis is on the former.
jfrunyon 5y ago
It absolutely is taught in secondary education in the US. Heck, it's taught during elementary education. But you can't teach someone something unless they're willing to learn it. Post-secondary education doesn't help that.
- otterley 5y ago
  Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.

parineum 5y ago

> It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it. Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.

xvector 5y ago

> makes people waste their best years I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sli 5y ago

The whole "college = liberal arts majors" is a wildly reductive argument and is extremely common among the types that OP is referring to. It's pretty disheartening to see it repeated here.

dijit 5y ago
Do you have any actual numbers on BA vs BC (or BA vs BSc)? There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > it is overrepresented Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields. Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  > I think it is overrepresented in universities What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular. I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better. Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not). [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4 http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4
anovikov 5y ago
People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

I found college had a net positive effect on me. It gave me a great deal of discipline and the helped me develop important critical thinking skills. Though I did a mix of STEM and economics, I can't vouch for other degrees. Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends. It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.

teachrdan 5y ago

> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below: "Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma." But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades. I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair. This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/collegepayoff.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...

inside65 5y ago
I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing. Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start. Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.
- teachrdan 5y ago
  By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things. This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter. I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.

prions 5y ago

Youre underestimating the value of a college degree. Research like [1] shows that degree holders have significantly more lifetime earnings than high school. You also miss how the democratization of education has benefited our society and helped lift millions out of subsistence lifestyles and class lock-in. "This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors" This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale. 1. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...

ModernMech 5y ago
Many in the tech community turn exclusively to technology to solve every problem. It doesn’t occur to such people that e.g. sociologists, who study problems of society as a discipline, have any answers whatsoever to our problems as a society. To them, sociology is just another useless liberal arts degree without job prospects. In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  But I did listen to sociologists when I took a distribution requirement in college. I'll never do it again. It was 80% totally obvious facts about human behavior that don't need to be taught and 20% totally contrived BS. No science going on there.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    So you took 1 intro class into a subject and determined the entire field is worthless? Do you apply this decision-making process to other aspects of your life? Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be. To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.

abvdasker 5y ago

The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college: > When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat). I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

We'd need to significantly improve high schools before considering eliminating college. Let's face it. We can't expect American high schools to teach students anything about the world. We've had schools try to spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World. We've had attempts to show "both sides" of the Holocaust. And yes, college isn't perfect at teaching liberal arts, but it's better than not learning at all. I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art? Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years. I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.

fallingknife 5y ago
> spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World That's not spin. That's exactly what the slave trade was.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  I'd firmly disagree. Workers has an implication of voluntary, paid work. There's a reason we have a specific word for unpaid, non-voluntary work. Not to mention slavery extended beyond work. Being a slave was not only backbreaking unpaid labor, but also a whole host of horrors outside work such as rape, family separation, forced breeding, torture, etc. Calling slaves "workers" is a deeply inaccurate categorization. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-rev...

tfehring 5y ago

> makes people waste their best years What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway. > teaches them mainly, useless stuff Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless. > barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree. > and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.