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This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for

This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there. Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals. I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  Communicating with eachother, knowledge of business, and understanding language seem like things we would want more of in society. Not sure why they would be demonized. Is the goal of higher-education to promote learning and build a well-rounded citizenry or to create worker drones?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Not sure why they would be demonized Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not. There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      > Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not. What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways I agree, and was on the edge in not including that major, but did so because there are English majors and there are undergrads who got a degree in English. At a lot of tier 2 public universities (e.g. the one I went to), the latter dominate. A student showing initiative can get a top-notch liberal arts education. But the average student won't. They'll skim, read the SparkNotes and pass through unchanged because the point isn't studying literature but getting a diploma. Students who want to learn anything should be given the opportunity. I strongly believe that. But more people with degrees doesn't make for a better-educated population. And driving money into encouraging that doesn't necessarily advance society either.
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      This sounds like a bias working backwards to find a justification. Is there any studies or data that support your stance? Which are the "good" majors? Who gets to judge that? > There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, and not mastering new ways to think. The biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization involved. Must be a useless field of study.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization This is a straw man. Nobody said memorization is verboten. A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars. If a med school matriculated students who never did practical and had never deliberated treatment modes and tradeoffs, et cetera, yes, it would be close to useless.
- BingoAhoy 5y ago
  Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively. English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated. Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    What kind of argument is that. For every 10,000 English majors there is maybe 1 Stephen king or anything close to ti
    - beepbooptheory 5y ago
      I think it's a quite good argument, and at very least one that doesn't rely on colleges literally producing a larger number Stephen Kings, as if something about the quantity produced could matter at all (really curious how you even arrived at that counter).
      - ryan93 5y ago
        It’s not a good argument. Zero good writers learned it in college.
        tomrod 5y ago
        If one did, do you realize your argument fails? http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers
        ryan93 5y ago
        No. All learned to write by sitting down by themselves and writing.
        5y ago
- 11101010001100 5y ago
  For those who work in adtech now, there's some hubris to be had. That industry was founded by people with those very degrees.
wil421 5y ago
Yes I can say the same in the US. My state paid full tuition for B average and above students if you went to a college in the state. After a little over a year I took off and went back to school while working at a later point. By that time I qualified for federal tuition aid but lost my state one. It wasn’t much over $20k for 5 years out of pocket for me.
- upbeat_general 5y ago
  What state does that? B average and above is probably ~50% of high school students so that’s full tuition for half of all high schoolers.
  - wil421 5y ago
    Georgia’s hope scholarship did in the 2000s. Now Hope doesn’t cover everything but there’s something called the Zell Miller grant that you can get in conjunction with Hope that pretty much pays most of tuition like the old program. Hope is funded by the lottery.
gorjusborg 5y ago
I've lived in the U.S. my entire life, and I agree with you. Our culture somehow misses the fact that as a society we benefit from educated citizens. There's even a segment of the population that fetishizes ignorance as a virtue, and knowledge as leftist indoctrination. There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
- autokad 5y ago
  > knowledge as leftist indoctrination. Almost all of my classes had leftist brainwashing. In my machine learning class, the professor would use voting republican as a classifier making the wrong decision. Given that people had made it this far in education to be good at repeating and learning what ever the professor says and that the professor is in a position of power over the students, this is very bad. > There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government. Well, we now have to show our papers to go to restaurants, bars, work, etc and are now required to mask our faces in public. its considered an act of terrorism to raise your voice at a school board meeting, and we're being censored on internet platforms. so yeah, you already accomplished your soviet-style authoritarianism.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Academia is a hostile environment for a right-leaning person. When less than 5% of professors identify as conservative, why would you gravitate to it, as a conservative? That's half the country, by the way. Maybe that has something to do with low engagement. Consequently, the institution suffers dramatically from its own groupthink. That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of education, such as vocational or work experience. One is not better than the other. I'm weary of people that think they're smarter or better than someone else on the basis of what school they went to or how long for. Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Particularly in the information age, but even well before the age we find ourselves in, there's always been value in the pragmatic experience of less intellectual pursuits. I'd say the U.S.'s slant towards pragmatism and away from intellectualism is one of my favorite things about the country. I'd say it showed itself pretty well on the Covid response. Red states were more quicker to re-open, quicker to drop restrictions, and quicker to move on to living with Covid and in spite of it. People knew intuitively that you wouldn't be able to control a virus more infectious than the common cold. And many people know this, intuitively as well, that's why New York loss record population last year and why Florida and Texas grew dramatically. The intellectuals running New York and New York City probably have tons of education and not one bit of common sense, because all they know is conformity. When an ordained expert says jump, they ask how high? That doesn't even begin to cover the other part of it, which is how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.
jackson1442 5y ago
I’m attending a state school in the US, and my degree costs about $13k/year + books + housing.
contravariant 5y ago
Some of the 'let's saddle students with debt' vibe seems to have pollinated the Netherlands, though for reasons that I applaud but don't quite understand pretty much everyone now considers it a bad idea.
- mettamage 5y ago
  I have no data, I'm simply stating my beliefs to give you an understanding, since I feel I'm one of the people you happen to be surprised about. Free education levels the playing field. Moreover, I feel guilt. I have been a beneficiary of free education. Free transport, free college tuition, free books and some paid assistance with living somewhere else. Coming from a working class family it has given me an amazing boost in: * Career (master computer science) * Spiritual knowledge (one Buddhism course was enough) * Outlook on the world * Network University isn't perfect, but if I wasn't given this chance then I would not be able to replicate certain pivotal experiences simply by using the internet and my own wit. In that sense, I still believe it levels the playing field by quite a bit. School was always meant as the great equalizer and I think it still should be, as imperfect as it is.
paulpauper 5y ago
This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
- chaosbolt 5y ago
  >I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted. Yeah this is problematic, on one hand you have people who work harder for it pass the entrance exams and get in (like in France for example where some engineering schools like Polytechnique and ENS have a super difficult entrance exam but then you know everyone studying there earned it), but on the other hand you get some people who are just lazy or not good at physics get filtered from top tier positions in CS because the entrance exam had Math and Physics equally attribute to your grade.
- bernulli 5y ago
  In Germany, the overall entry requirement is a not horrible high school degree (type of high school intended to prepare for an academic career) for engineering. You can just go and sign up to the university of your choice. The flip side is that you then sit there with hundreds of other students that will be weeded out by a harsh curriculum and zero advisement. That said, whoever gets through that system will be worth their price later on when you hire them.
- tkgally 5y ago
  College is, overall, cheaper in Japan than in the U.S., but it isn’t free [1]. You might be thinking of some countries in Europe. The top schools in Japan are indeed quite competitive, but there are also universities that admit almost any high school graduate. A few decades ago, a lot of new universities were established just when the birthrate was starting to drop. Now some lower-tier private universities are struggling to attract enough students to survive. [1] https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13-17c083b9a00a https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13...
ren_engineer 5y ago
>Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  My theatre degree has been useless from a compensation standpoint for me. It was somewhat helpful when I was in sales but I only got it because it was the easiest degree that required the least amount of maths. I went to college because my parents forced me to. Thankfully I got out without any debt. I cant imagine how upset I would be if I racked up 100K is debt and ended up with a useless degree like many of my friends did. That being said... I cant really blame my parents for forcing me to go. It did seem like the best option at the time. No one told me, or I guess them, about alternative educational programs or trade schools. I'd probably be a carpenter now if someone had. I had pretty much zero plans for my life post high school so college at least gave me something to do while I figured it out.
- acchow 5y ago
  > kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials They also force each other into "worthless credentials", as many college graduates will only date other college graduates.
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  Paying for the Party is a good book about this issue of STEM degrees being flat and money being pumped in by students doing marketing, PR, communications, and business management degrees.
- 5y ago
feoren 5y ago
> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life! Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.
banannaise 5y ago
There is a rapidly growing list of increasingly dire "strictly American problems". I wonder when and how it will break.
timmg 5y ago
> Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all... I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay. You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Some people hate college and only go for the degree. College should be accessible to everyone but not everyone needs to go to college.
- ryan93 5y ago
  How is it not accessible? Federal loans are given no questions asked. Where are these good students who can’t get into college
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
> I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success. The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem. Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  This is an important point that isn't being made enough in this thread. Must we all trade our youth for what amounts to a cost sunk fallacy that commits us to a path we may not even like?
  - hooande 5y ago
    Think of college as a social experience for children of privileged backgrounds. Four years of minimal responsibility, ample social activities and idle study. I would love to have that now. It's expensive, but nice work if you can get it
    - ryan93 5y ago
      As has been mentioned in this thread countless times. Any kid can get loans no question asked for college. Not just the privileged.
joey_bob 5y ago
Our state has a program that covers tuition if you are in-state, received good grades in high school, and continue to maintain those. Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states. My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)
abeppu 5y ago
> America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there. I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment#2019_OECD_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc. We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.
julienb_sea 5y ago
I don't know in which non-American worldview you subscribe, but America has a higher rate of tertiary education achievement than practically every European nation (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...). European countries have more selective and restrictive advanced education requirements, they just don't charge for them. This is the literal opposite of "supporting advanced education for all". To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.
- csomar 5y ago
  For the 25-64 Segment but try the 25-34 and suddenly you have a different picture.
kgin 5y ago
Americans have one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. America just wants new grads to be indebted to motivate them to get to work.
beepbooptheory 5y ago
There is little hope anymore for actual advancement anyway, just a tendency downwards, punctuated by small spurts of different kinds of enthusiasm. We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling. How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles. The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore
maccolgan 5y ago
> This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.
mcguire 5y ago
Which country? I don't know of any that get close to "advanced education for all". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment#Countries_by_level_of_tertiary_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
ngngngng 5y ago
It's different and worse than you say. We put it on a pedestal, decided it was worth any cost, decided everyone should have the ability to go, but that they should all have to shoulder that burden themself. A large part of the issue right now is the system we've built allows any student to obtain a predatory loan to cover the entirety of the outrageous costs, and any political effort to change this is likely career suicide because it will be seen as keeping underprivileged students out of the best programs and therefore stunting their futures.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)

long_time_gone 5y ago
Communicating with eachother, knowledge of business, and understanding language seem like things we would want more of in society. Not sure why they would be demonized. Is the goal of higher-education to promote learning and build a well-rounded citizenry or to create worker drones?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Not sure why they would be demonized Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not. There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    > Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not. What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways I agree, and was on the edge in not including that major, but did so because there are English majors and there are undergrads who got a degree in English. At a lot of tier 2 public universities (e.g. the one I went to), the latter dominate. A student showing initiative can get a top-notch liberal arts education. But the average student won't. They'll skim, read the SparkNotes and pass through unchanged because the point isn't studying literature but getting a diploma. Students who want to learn anything should be given the opportunity. I strongly believe that. But more people with degrees doesn't make for a better-educated population. And driving money into encouraging that doesn't necessarily advance society either.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    This sounds like a bias working backwards to find a justification. Is there any studies or data that support your stance? Which are the "good" majors? Who gets to judge that? > There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, and not mastering new ways to think. The biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization involved. Must be a useless field of study.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization This is a straw man. Nobody said memorization is verboten. A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars. If a med school matriculated students who never did practical and had never deliberated treatment modes and tradeoffs, et cetera, yes, it would be close to useless.
BingoAhoy 5y ago
Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively. English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated. Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
- ryan93 5y ago
  What kind of argument is that. For every 10,000 English majors there is maybe 1 Stephen king or anything close to ti
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    I think it's a quite good argument, and at very least one that doesn't rely on colleges literally producing a larger number Stephen Kings, as if something about the quantity produced could matter at all (really curious how you even arrived at that counter).
    - ryan93 5y ago
      It’s not a good argument. Zero good writers learned it in college.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        If one did, do you realize your argument fails? http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers
        ryan93 5y ago
        No. All learned to write by sitting down by themselves and writing.
        5y ago
11101010001100 5y ago
For those who work in adtech now, there's some hubris to be had. That industry was founded by people with those very degrees.

wil421 5y ago

Yes I can say the same in the US. My state paid full tuition for B average and above students if you went to a college in the state. After a little over a year I took off and went back to school while working at a later point. By that time I qualified for federal tuition aid but lost my state one. It wasn’t much over $20k for 5 years out of pocket for me.

upbeat_general 5y ago
What state does that? B average and above is probably ~50% of high school students so that’s full tuition for half of all high schoolers.
- wil421 5y ago
  Georgia’s hope scholarship did in the 2000s. Now Hope doesn’t cover everything but there’s something called the Zell Miller grant that you can get in conjunction with Hope that pretty much pays most of tuition like the old program. Hope is funded by the lottery.

gorjusborg 5y ago

I've lived in the U.S. my entire life, and I agree with you. Our culture somehow misses the fact that as a society we benefit from educated citizens. There's even a segment of the population that fetishizes ignorance as a virtue, and knowledge as leftist indoctrination. There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.

autokad 5y ago
> knowledge as leftist indoctrination. Almost all of my classes had leftist brainwashing. In my machine learning class, the professor would use voting republican as a classifier making the wrong decision. Given that people had made it this far in education to be good at repeating and learning what ever the professor says and that the professor is in a position of power over the students, this is very bad. > There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government. Well, we now have to show our papers to go to restaurants, bars, work, etc and are now required to mask our faces in public. its considered an act of terrorism to raise your voice at a school board meeting, and we're being censored on internet platforms. so yeah, you already accomplished your soviet-style authoritarianism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chrisco255 5y ago
Academia is a hostile environment for a right-leaning person. When less than 5% of professors identify as conservative, why would you gravitate to it, as a conservative? That's half the country, by the way. Maybe that has something to do with low engagement. Consequently, the institution suffers dramatically from its own groupthink. That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of education, such as vocational or work experience. One is not better than the other. I'm weary of people that think they're smarter or better than someone else on the basis of what school they went to or how long for. Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Particularly in the information age, but even well before the age we find ourselves in, there's always been value in the pragmatic experience of less intellectual pursuits. I'd say the U.S.'s slant towards pragmatism and away from intellectualism is one of my favorite things about the country. I'd say it showed itself pretty well on the Covid response. Red states were more quicker to re-open, quicker to drop restrictions, and quicker to move on to living with Covid and in spite of it. People knew intuitively that you wouldn't be able to control a virus more infectious than the common cold. And many people know this, intuitively as well, that's why New York loss record population last year and why Florida and Texas grew dramatically. The intellectuals running New York and New York City probably have tons of education and not one bit of common sense, because all they know is conformity. When an ordained expert says jump, they ask how high? That doesn't even begin to cover the other part of it, which is how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.

jackson1442 5y ago

I’m attending a state school in the US, and my degree costs about $13k/year + books + housing.

contravariant 5y ago

Some of the 'let's saddle students with debt' vibe seems to have pollinated the Netherlands, though for reasons that I applaud but don't quite understand pretty much everyone now considers it a bad idea.

mettamage 5y ago
I have no data, I'm simply stating my beliefs to give you an understanding, since I feel I'm one of the people you happen to be surprised about. Free education levels the playing field. Moreover, I feel guilt. I have been a beneficiary of free education. Free transport, free college tuition, free books and some paid assistance with living somewhere else. Coming from a working class family it has given me an amazing boost in: * Career (master computer science) * Spiritual knowledge (one Buddhism course was enough) * Outlook on the world * Network University isn't perfect, but if I wasn't given this chance then I would not be able to replicate certain pivotal experiences simply by using the internet and my own wit. In that sense, I still believe it levels the playing field by quite a bit. School was always meant as the great equalizer and I think it still should be, as imperfect as it is.

paulpauper 5y ago

This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.

chaosbolt 5y ago
>I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted. Yeah this is problematic, on one hand you have people who work harder for it pass the entrance exams and get in (like in France for example where some engineering schools like Polytechnique and ENS have a super difficult entrance exam but then you know everyone studying there earned it), but on the other hand you get some people who are just lazy or not good at physics get filtered from top tier positions in CS because the entrance exam had Math and Physics equally attribute to your grade.
bernulli 5y ago
In Germany, the overall entry requirement is a not horrible high school degree (type of high school intended to prepare for an academic career) for engineering. You can just go and sign up to the university of your choice. The flip side is that you then sit there with hundreds of other students that will be weeded out by a harsh curriculum and zero advisement. That said, whoever gets through that system will be worth their price later on when you hire them.
tkgally 5y ago
College is, overall, cheaper in Japan than in the U.S., but it isn’t free [1]. You might be thinking of some countries in Europe. The top schools in Japan are indeed quite competitive, but there are also universities that admit almost any high school graduate. A few decades ago, a lot of new universities were established just when the birthrate was starting to drop. Now some lower-tier private universities are struggling to attract enough students to survive. [1] https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13-17c083b9a00a https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13...

ren_engineer 5y ago

>Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting

AlwaysRock 5y ago
My theatre degree has been useless from a compensation standpoint for me. It was somewhat helpful when I was in sales but I only got it because it was the easiest degree that required the least amount of maths. I went to college because my parents forced me to. Thankfully I got out without any debt. I cant imagine how upset I would be if I racked up 100K is debt and ended up with a useless degree like many of my friends did. That being said... I cant really blame my parents for forcing me to go. It did seem like the best option at the time. No one told me, or I guess them, about alternative educational programs or trade schools. I'd probably be a carpenter now if someone had. I had pretty much zero plans for my life post high school so college at least gave me something to do while I figured it out.
acchow 5y ago
> kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials They also force each other into "worthless credentials", as many college graduates will only date other college graduates.
thundergolfer 5y ago
Paying for the Party is a good book about this issue of STEM degrees being flat and money being pumped in by students doing marketing, PR, communications, and business management degrees.
5y ago

feoren 5y ago

> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life! Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.

banannaise 5y ago

There is a rapidly growing list of increasingly dire "strictly American problems". I wonder when and how it will break.

timmg 5y ago

> Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all... I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay. You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Some people hate college and only go for the degree. College should be accessible to everyone but not everyone needs to go to college.

ryan93 5y ago
How is it not accessible? Federal loans are given no questions asked. Where are these good students who can’t get into college

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

> I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success. The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem. Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.

betwixthewires 5y ago
This is an important point that isn't being made enough in this thread. Must we all trade our youth for what amounts to a cost sunk fallacy that commits us to a path we may not even like?
- hooande 5y ago
  Think of college as a social experience for children of privileged backgrounds. Four years of minimal responsibility, ample social activities and idle study. I would love to have that now. It's expensive, but nice work if you can get it
  - ryan93 5y ago
    As has been mentioned in this thread countless times. Any kid can get loans no question asked for college. Not just the privileged.

joey_bob 5y ago

Our state has a program that covers tuition if you are in-state, received good grades in high school, and continue to maintain those. Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states. My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)

abeppu 5y ago

> America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there. I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment#2019_OECD_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc. We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.

julienb_sea 5y ago

I don't know in which non-American worldview you subscribe, but America has a higher rate of tertiary education achievement than practically every European nation (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...). European countries have more selective and restrictive advanced education requirements, they just don't charge for them. This is the literal opposite of "supporting advanced education for all". To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.

csomar 5y ago
For the 25-64 Segment but try the 25-34 and suddenly you have a different picture.

kgin 5y ago

Americans have one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. America just wants new grads to be indebted to motivate them to get to work.

beepbooptheory 5y ago

There is little hope anymore for actual advancement anyway, just a tendency downwards, punctuated by small spurts of different kinds of enthusiasm. We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling. How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles. The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore

maccolgan 5y ago

> This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.

mcguire 5y ago

Which country? I don't know of any that get close to "advanced education for all". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment#Countries_by_level_of_tertiary_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

ngngngng 5y ago

It's different and worse than you say. We put it on a pedestal, decided it was worth any cost, decided everyone should have the ability to go, but that they should all have to shoulder that burden themself. A large part of the issue right now is the system we've built allows any student to obtain a predatory loan to cover the entirety of the outrageous costs, and any political effort to change this is likely career suicide because it will be seen as keeping underprivileged students out of the best programs and therefore stunting their futures.