19 ms·

College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, en

• azinman2 4y ago
  It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career paths don’t require it and many aren’t smart enough for it (and thus the debt will be crushing). But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do - learn one of those and you can do just about anything.
  • phpisthebest 4y ago
    I think you have conflated college with education. One can get education, build professional networks, etc with out college and importantly one can go to college complete a degree program while receiving zero education. many (most) Colleges is more of a social guild than it is an educational ventures
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Very few on their own would get anywhere close to what a college gives you in terms of an education. Particularly in ways that are far broader than what you’d do professionally. Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.
      • phpisthebest 4y ago
        >>4 years of education on a daily basis. Is it? Really??? For all degrees and all programs.. that is the claim... but I just do not see that manifest in reality. Seem you have a very inflated view of the programs... just how much debt are you attempting to justify?
        • azinman2 4y ago
          I carry zero educational debt. How do you not see that manifest in reality? What school doesn’t have classes 5 days a week that people are taking, or otherwise expected to be somehow participating in an activity related to education? Sounds like a school that should lose its accreditation.
          • 7thaccount 4y ago
            Agree with you here. I typically had at least 2 classes a day and spent most of the time outside of class studying or doing homework. It was easily more than 40 hours/week. That was for an engineering degree though. Friends in other programs (e.g. business, kinesiology...etc) had to spend much less time on homework and studying, but even they were learning daily.
          • phpisthebest 4y ago
            I have known alot of students, in many programs. On average I say students have classes 2 - 3 days a week, with 2 classes per day... I know more than a few students attending top rated public universities. According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day and less than half of what is expected. Only about 11% of students spend more than 25 hours/week on schoolwork. [1] a "Full time" course load is 15 credit hours, which is about 5 classes.. a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class.. In the past I have run college level internship programs, both for credit, and critically for this discussion not for credit (meaning no affiliation with the schools). I have had no problems scheduling students work around their course schedule, for which they normally have 2 or 3 open days for work. [1] https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-time-matters/ https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-tim...
  • mfer 4y ago
    > But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. Few universities teach how to think. Most teach what to think. Critical thinking, reasoning through ideas and concepts, and research are often lacking. > I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do I don't buy that. You can't by a psychiatrist. You can't be a medical doctor or nutritionist. There are a lot of useful things in this word, that we collectively need, you can't do with those. But, I do think teaching philosophy would be useful. That involves learning how to think things through which isn't, for the most part, taught. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. There is an error in reasoning right here. The implication from the context is that you need to go to a college or university to be more educated. That's not true. It's also a complex question to ask, what level of education on what does who need?
    • sidlls 4y ago
      The context within the social and economic structure of society matters, too. Very few good quality careers are accessible for the self-taught individual.
      • mfer 4y ago
        Who defines good quality? Is this compensation? Is this satisfaction with what you do? Is this ability to pay your bills and save enough? How much does one need (what's enough)? This is all complicated and we tend to focus on compensation. That's why so many people stay in jobs for the pay while they hate the work. There are lots of good quality jobs out there if you expand your definition beyond "highest compensation". I know people who switched and were much happier in trades. They felt far more satisfied, could daily see their accomplishment, and meet their bills (and then some). Where did you get your view on good quality careers from?
        • sidlls 4y ago
          In our society jobs that are satisfying are often not an option (even for the trades), regardless of the pay and regardless of the educational requirements. In the context of this thread it is (almost) all about compensation. "Good quality" is in the sense that one can earn enough to "meet their bills (and then some)" and also weather a major event (such as a medical event). Satisfaction may or may not apply.
  • xyzelement 4y ago
    I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume, and having the desire for intellectual growth as a prerequisite just wouldn't scale. I also think that some of the classes I took (20 years ago, at a state school) would not be taught this way today. Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. Ditto even on a class that focused on Soviet dystopian literature taught by an emrigre. The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I say this as a person with 3 degrees. Higher education worked for me because I made sure it did and colleges were more old school then than now.
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Re: critical analysis. I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
      • xyzelement 4y ago
        Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.
  • zoogeny 4y ago
    Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions. I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning. For a lot of young kids, school is more like a prison than an intellectual garden. Yet a certain kind of thinking keeps these institutions mandated with the good intention of growing souls. My own opinion is that the current means is utterly failing at generating the desired ends. As the antiquated expression goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
    • thomastjeffery 4y ago
      What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students. It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning. The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student. Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.
      • Izkata 4y ago
        > What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.
  • dmonitor 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Have you even seen a college classroom in the last decade? The STEM classes absolutely have dedicated learners, but most of the people in those other classes can barely write their name on the corner of the page and the classes are designed to cater to their abilities because if they flunk out, they don’t pay next years tuition.
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    That's #2 on the GP. At least if the college is as expensive as the US ones are, only the elite can get a positive value from those things.
  • sircastor 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I think this is one of the more valuable components of attending university - in part just because it exposes one to more people, from more diverse backgrounds. It encourages you to see the world from more than one perspective, and to (I hope) be able to understand and be more compassionate about others. There is a segment of people (in the US at least) that don't want kids to go to college for exactly this reason - they don't want their kids, or other young people to be exposed to or trained in critical thinking and broad perspectives.
  • thomastjeffery 4y ago
    College/University does not have a monopoly on intellectualism or networking. There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating.
    • azinman2 4y ago
      You’re right. It’s not a guarantee. But it’s a situation where it’s served to you on a platter. If you’re not capable of receiving it on a platter, it’s doubtful you’ll get it on your own. Not everyone is capable of getting it in either scenario - as such as I said I’m glad more vocational opportunities are becoming in vogue again. Let’s just hope these vocations last another 20-30 years.
      • Master_Odin 4y ago
        I think a number of hands on vocational jobs will last longer than quite a few white collar jobs. The robotics necessary for those jobs is quite far behind where we are with the necessary software.
    • juve1996 4y ago
      > There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating. Two things - that guaranteed cost CAN be debilitating. It also might not be. There are plenty of cheaper options available for higher education. And, in general, people with higher education make more money overall.
      • thomastjeffery 4y ago
        You can't trust a generalization to direct you to a specific outcome.
        • juve1996 4y ago
  • anonuser123456 4y ago
    >It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. I am skeptical of this claim. In my experience, it just enshrines a different set of beliefs into students rather than new paradigms of critical thinking.
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Then I don’t think where you went to school did a very good job of educating, or I’d suggest you didn’t pick up on what was being put down. For it to not provide critical thinking and/or depth of knowledge in a subject is a failed mission.
      • mtrower 4y ago
        If so many people are reporting this experience, it may be time to re-evaluate the current state of education.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • kneebonian 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Good will Hunting > It also builds professional networks. Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. If colleges were still about educating I might agree with you but we are a long way from colleges being about educating people. At this points it's simply a social signal.
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Few will spend a huge amount of time self educating, and even fewer can read the books and understand what to extract from it without guidance. That’s the whole point of having a subject matter expert design and teach a curriculum. If you don’t value that, then in your world we should abolish high schools and earlier as well. If you look at societies where people don’t go to school versus where people do, the results are quite different for society. The evidence speaks for itself. > Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow. There can be multiple benefits simultaneously at different levels. If whatever college you’re attending is only creating a social signal and not meaningfully educating, then that school lose its accreditation.
      • mtrower 4y ago
        So wait, if a person fails to benefit from college, it's their own fault for not taking what was "handed to them on a platter" (as you mention in another of your posts" --- but if they fail to self-educate, it's only natural and thus a problem of not going to college?
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    If a person is smart enough to receive it And this can't be the case, at least not in the sense that colleges can offer education at the caliber they once were when only educating 25-30% of the population 70+ years ago. Academic ability, like most other traits, exists on something close to a normal distribution. Not to mention the failings of the secondary education system feeding into it.
  • ryan93 4y ago
    Id be surprised if 5% of college students "grow their souls" weirdly clueless thing to write. Not hard to find out that most people get business, psych and econ degrees. And even english or history majors half ass it just to get through.
  • ryeguy_24 4y ago
    Everyone says that it teaches you how to think but I’ve never heard of a good reason why. I remember difficult classes but I don’t remember any special sauce that made me think differently than I did in high school. I’m not saying that I don’t believe that it teaches you this, I just have never heard more reasoning than the surface statement. Does anyone have any examples or theories of this?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • klooney 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. That's the "finishing school for the elite" function. If you have to ask if you can afford that, you cannot.
  • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. Are you speaking narrowly of credential-granting schools or do you actually mean education here?
  • stainablesteel 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. oh are we talking about youtube? i love youtube
  • palijer 4y ago
    >It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that happens to folks who attend school, but I don't think it is the school that causes this to happen. I think this effect is bound to happen to any young person who moves away from their home to live independently for the first time with a thousand other folks who are doing the same thing. Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development.
    • juve1996 4y ago
      But not everyone moves far away to go to school and not all schools are in the big city. In fact, schools now have evolved closer to daycares with the amount of money being poured into dining halls and fitness centers. > Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development. Eh. Plenty of people migrate. That doesn't make them educated, necessarily.
  • gersh 4y ago
    Are modern colleges actually succeeding: 1) Exposing people to depth of thought 2) Teach people how to think Maybe, at one time they did, and maybe some schools still do, but it doesn't seem like most modern colleges are really doing this very well.
  • jackmott 4y ago
    [dead]
  • NathanNgata 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls maybe only a byproduct, it's more of a means to an end system. people are at the universities they are in because going to college still means something to the job market as opposed to learning everything else where. The people who really grow there 'intellectual souls' are those who would grow it regardless of environment/circumstance. while I do believe it is a great thing for people to desire to advance themselves intellectually I don't believe it should cost as much as it does. It's ridiculous. > If a person is smart enough to receive it + many aren’t smart enough for it the benefits of becoming educated in its most fundamental sense don't vary with intellectual ability. the way educational institutions are currently structured is one of many ways of educating people, so the question becomes whether that way of educating is optimal for an individual. ---- (opinion) universities should be purely for the pursuit of knowledge and shouldn't be there to provide relevancy to the job market. That should be the job of systems specializing in providing pathways to certain job market sectors. currently universities conflate the two which has lead to most of the problems they have been ascribed with today
  • bumby 4y ago
    >more education is almost always good Yes, but we also need to be cognizant of the opportunity costs: 4 years of gainful, productive employment minus educational debt. I don’t think university has a monopoly on education any longer. But they still maintain one on accreditation. As a society we need to take a hard look at what credentials certain degrees really need.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It doesn’t uniquely do this. You don’t need college to have intellectual conversations or be exposed to new ideas.
    • comfypotato 4y ago
      This has changed over time. Probably simply because of the internet. It used to be harder to expose yourself to the variety of ideas and perspective that college did.
    • thaw13579 4y ago
      It's hard to find opportunities for this outside college. Most people are not interested in intellectual talk, so the question is how to meet like-minded folks? I can't seem to find better alternatives to universities, for both number and diversity of opportunities. Book clubs seem like the best option but are often too narrowly focused on literature.
  • castella 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. As a (not so) recent grad from a top public university in the US - for STEM fields, absolutely. But from my exposure to the humanities and liberal arts side of the campus, be it gen ed classes or just day-to-day interactions with those students, it was far more like a brainwashing factory designed to churn out professional activists. Those classes were far more about rote memorization and regurgitation of the professor's political opinions than any sort of critical thinking; diverge from that "Overton window" and your grades will suffer.
    • Tanjreeve 4y ago
      And you're sure that you aren't the one who was upset at being exposed to new ideas and perspectives?
  • rayiner 4y ago
    > it also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought This illogical trope is responsible for so much suffering, being responsible for driving millions of people to waste their time and money pursuing useless college educations.
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    >It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. This is a thing that people say, but I've never seen it happen. To the extent that people are exposed to depth of thought or new ideas, the people interested would have found those things faster, cheaper, and more frequently if they avoided the rat race parts of university programs. It's similar to the thought that university degrees help people economically, but that is rarely the case. We've spent many human generations trying to figure out how to move the needle and it's mostly IQ + big 5 personality + luck. The people that COULD have gotten into Harvard but chose to go elsewhere wind up with the same outcomes as the people who DO go to Harvard.
  • Varqu 4y ago
    I would argue that it nowadays teaches more herd-behavior and political correctness than depth of thought (example: last Stanford Law dean case)
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > more education is almost always good There is a lot of nonsense credentialing in America. My most rewarding liberal arts classes in college were electives. Scratch that: the only liberal arts classes I took that had merit were electives. The others’ reading lists were fun. But the discussion, assignments and evaluation stupid to the point that I spent years thinking up clever quips to the absurdity of it all.
  • muyuu 4y ago
    out of all the reasons, IMO that is most anachronistic given the way that both Universities and society at large have changed away from these dynamics - and given also that the need for that personal access has also decreased dramatically over the last few decades
  • AmericanChopper 4y ago
    > grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought It’s honestly cringe when people talk about colleges as if they have some sort of monopoly on thinking. If you want to be intellect stimulated, then do intellectually stimulating things, like reading lots of books. Will Hunting was basically correct about library cards (though it’s not like you really even need libraries any more).
  • alphanullmeric 4y ago
    Philosophy? A subject so useless the only jobs it qualifies you far are those that have you teach it to others. I have no idea why you’d group a pyramid scheme with two sciences.
  • lumb63 4y ago
    I suspect the folks here defending philosophy had a very different experience with philosophy than I did. I took an ethics class in college through the philosophy department and all I remember from the class was the professor telling us that pro-choice was the only philosophically defensible position, and reading various excerpts from Plato, etc., without ever discussing “how to think about it” like some siblings mention. Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning about philosophy? I’ve read some Aristotle and Plato but I think I’d benefit from something more structured.
    • jltsiren 4y ago
      A single class is too little to really learn anything. As a rule of thumb, a semester of full-time work is enough to learn one "thing". That thing can be wide, in which case you get an overview of the topic, or it can be narrow, allowing you to dive deeper. Anything less, and the only thing you'll likely retain is a random selection of ideas and factoids. If the degree nominally takes 4 years to complete, you have enough time to learn approximately 8 things. Use one slot for a subject, and most universities will give you an introduction to the topics covered by the subject. Use another, and then you may start understanding the arguments and issues in one subfield.
  • bastawhiz 4y ago
    > If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good. This presupposes that college provides a good enough education. Arguably, the more you pay for school, the better the quality of education. A community college CS education is probably not as good as getting your CS degree at MIT. I made the mistake of going to a college for my first two years with only two CS professors. I'd taken all of the first professor's classes, and the second professor grilled us on binary => decimal, no calculator allowed, on each of her finals (even for Cyber Security and Java!). Not every education is worth the ink the diploma is printed with. > Of course money is a factor, Money is THE factor. The cheapest educations that aren't useless are still too expensive for most Americans to afford. Almost nobody can pay for college up front, and the financing is extremely predatory. That's literally the crisis. No matter how good "learning to think" is, college simply isn't the right place to do it for millions of people. It ruins futures, and knowing how to think doesn't dig you out of crippling debt that only gets discharged if you die.
  • nine_k 4y ago
    It's definitely great to have all these wonderful things like wider general knowledge and being exposed to a serious depth of thought. The problem is, of course, the expense. Unless you have an independent source of income (a family-taught trade, or inherited wealth), you end up with all this more advanced knowledge at a position where you have little opportunity to apply it, and a crippling debt. To my mind, the right way to proceed is not to eliminate this kind of study, but to transform it so that it does not cost an arm and a leg. Which, I think, is completely doable.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    the people that can learning math, physics, and philosophy will have no troubles regardless of whether they study math, physics, or philosophy.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Is there any evidence of this?
  • eru 4y ago
    > It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. Eh, you can get all that without college. And you can go to college without getting any of that.
  • arthur_sav 4y ago
    > It also builds professional networks You know what else builds professional networks? Working and interacting with the real world.
• lxm 4y ago
  4. An amalgamation of sports teams for talented athletes to shop their skills to professional sports scouts.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    That's true but an extremely small cohort, <100 per school, at only a few of the top sports schools.
    • QuarterReptile 4y ago
      I suspect you're thinking too narrowly on this one. Sure, there's football and basketball (women's as well as men's), plus soccer and baseball, too, in the team sports space. But there are also plenty of golfers and tennis players, including in many schools you've never heard of, that have, or believe they have, a decent chance of going pro.
  • TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
    The sports side of college is bizarre. I think it is descended from British upper class amateur athletics, but it makes no sense in modern times. Athletics has nothing to do with education. Nothing at all. Star athletes are there only so they can get noticed by scouts. Universities keep teams around for the money. They ought to stop pretending there's any connection to education and replace it all with minor leagues and farm teams. But since there's a hundred years of tradition, I doubt anything will change.
    • vasco 4y ago
      They have something to do with it in the sense that many people practice them and they need to practice them growing up in order to be able to do it as a job. You also cannot discount the impact of athletics programs on national defense and the programs that were done by multiple presidents to keep people active and healthy. Sports have this quality among cultural activities that they tend to improve your body and reduce healthcare costs in the overall population the more active it is, while at the same time ensuring you have at least some people that could go to war if needed. This explains why there's more legislative support and allowances for sports programs than say music or theater.
• tempsy 4y ago
  it’s more like people tricked into going into the finishing school route at a non-elite college, not about whether you come from a rich family or not and don’t need to take on debt. Go to an Ivy League and major in history and you still have a better chance at getting a job at an elite investment bank than someone who goes to a non target state school and majors in statistics or something.
  • gloryjulio 4y ago
    Yes, basically lots of low tier unis are not worth wasting ur money on. Ironically, I learnt the most important skills(learn how to learn effectively, prioritization etc) only after I started to work in a company where I was getting coached. I would have been far more efficient if go back to school now.
    • tempsy 4y ago
      i wouldn’t say that. i just think if you go to a lower ranked school your path to career success more so relies on getting a technical degree but yes you shouldn’t be studying liberal arts at a no name school.
      • hgsgm 4y ago
        That's what parent&thread said. Technical trade was mentioned as a category
        • tempsy 4y ago
          yes i know. i’m just clarifying for the above comment that all lower ranked colleges are not worth attending
          • gloryjulio 4y ago
            > lots of low tier unis My original post is still up there you know. I never said ALL
      • 4y ago
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think part of the challenge and problem is that college has come to be synonymous with high tier universities. There's a ton of non monetary rewards that can be had cheaply from learning, whether it is art, history, or any of the non technical professions. This value can be had for pennies on the dollar at community colleges without locking oneself into a 4-year degree track. You can ignore it GEs and simply take the classes you want to learn. You don't have to front load education into your early twenties and then stop completely once you are done.
• varunjain99 4y ago
  I'd also add 4) A social / networking experience. As an adult, rarely will you interact so often with so many people of your age. 5. A signaling mechanism. I have X credentials so give me job Y. This is far from ideal because the signal can be noisy. But it is a data point. It's similar to how physics PhD's are targeted for quant finance roles - they've signaled they can solve hard problems!
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    4) if everyone wasn't locked up in college, they would meet other young adults in their neighborhood and social/hobby clubs and entertainment venues 5) in the modern day that can solved by testing regimes. A self-educated quant could take an online qualifying test, and in-person final exam, to get a job in finance.
    • tester756 4y ago
      In my experience - not really. I know a lot of people around my age and only 1 person is working in my industry.
    • Forgeties79 4y ago
      But tons of people aren’t locked up in college and aren’t meeting people in their area. They’ve also had their entire middle and high school years to do it. If they didn’t take advantage of it then, it’s unlikely they’ll take advantage of it at 18-21. I think we are also forgetting that it is good for people to get out of their local bubble and get other perspectives/experiences.
    • quags 4y ago
      I dropped out of college after 2 years about 20 years ago. I have never come across the same social interaction since then. The value of education on some degrees is certainly over stated , and there are areas that can be self taught. There is a lack of social learning though that doesn’t come outside of education and school.
    • cortesoft 4y ago
      I disagree with your testing theory. The signal from a degree isn't just that you know the content, but that you can consistently work towards a goal over many years, navigating a large organization with lots of arbitrary rules, and willingness to do assigned work that may serve no purpose. You can't test to show that ability.
• jimkleiber 4y ago
  I'm surprised you didn't include anything about meeting people for work, romance, friendship, or other social benefit, as for many, that can be a huge part of college.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    That's only because almost everyone desirable goes there. If people stopped going, they could meet elsewhere.
    • vehemenz 4y ago
      It sounds plausible, but university towns (at least in the US) are pretty unique in that they are dense and young people can afford to live there. You could say commuter campuses don't have the same social scene because not "everyone desirable goes there," but I'd wager it's more due to students driving in from 45 minutes away rather than living amongst each other.
    • jimkleiber 4y ago
      I think people have a lot of shared context in college that they don't often have elsewhere. Depending on the college, but especially in the US campus experience, people live together, eat together, study together, party together, and more. So I don't think it's just the desirability of people.
      • thaw13579 4y ago
        Yes, when mixed together in the world at large, it's rare to run into people who have enough shared context to click with.
    • thomastjeffery 4y ago
      The trouble is: where? The alternative is a variety of places, and practically all of them have some kind of tax; where it be coffee, alcohol, or some kind of membership fee. What we are missing is called, "the third place".
• hgsgm 4y ago
  > under the guise of "becoming a lifelong learner" or something, That's "finishing school for the [wannabe] elite" who find out at the end that they weren't ever in the elite.
• VLM 4y ago
  > this completely cripples them in the future when they could otherwise have had great careers > It's good that students are turning away now Conspiracy theory: the powers that be, are not dumb, they know this, and rely in this to increase their stability by eliminating the competition and the ambitious. Scared people make bad decisions; their replacement for neutering-via-college is not likely to be as easy to deal with, so I donno about "good" as an adjective.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dahart 4y ago
    This seems really funny to me. There’s been a huge push by elites and right-leaning politicians in particular to downplay college education and to trot out blue-collar workers, to convince people not to go to college. Joe the Plumber, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber Conservatives and businesses want more people to take low-paying jobs, and having the masses be educated threatens their ability to pay minimum wage. The St. Louis Fed published statistics [1] demonstrating that people with 4-year degrees earn an average of twice what people who don’t go to college earn. That is a truly massive discrepancy, and completely surprised me when I read it. I would have assumed that degrees were maybe a 10% or 15% advantage statistically. That it’s double is astounding, and it really very much undermines the notion that somehow people are getting tricked into going to college. [1] https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2019/10/15/is-college-still-worth-it-the-new-calculus-of-falling-returns.pdf https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie... (Note the title argues that college isn’t worth it. Read the statistics, they tell a completely different story. The headline is based on the idea that total savings at retirement came down somewhat for college educated people, and it completely neglects the fact that these savings are 2x larger than non-degree holders, and come after a lifetime of 2x higher salary.)
    • mtrower 4y ago
      > Conservatives and businesses want more people to take low-paying jobs, and having the masses be educated threatens their ability to pay minimum wage. Not having tradesman threatens the ability of society as we know it to continue. We aren't going to get far without carpenters and plumbers. These jobs simply need to pay more. > and it really very much undermines the notion that somehow people are getting tricked into going to college. It's also quite possible for them to come out of college $40k in debt, with no job to show for it, and end up struggling to pay that off for the rest of their lives. Idk about the article though, it opens by saying this person had a free ride on the table. They probably should have taken it.
• vehemenz 4y ago
  People—and not just "elites"—actually go to college to learn things. This is way too cynical/contrarian of a take. Attend more actual college, read less Howard Zinn.
  • Forgeties79 4y ago
    Yeah, I really don’t like the above take either. I have a history degree, and I’ve done very well for myself at a tech company. The writing and critical thinking skills I acquired have given me a huge leg up over more “technically minded” people in many situations (though I would never go as far as to say they wasted their time or I always have an advantage. It’s case by case, like most things in life). He’s basically doing the “kids go to college and get a useless English degree” line that many boomers throw around, just with different window dressing.
  • randomdata 4y ago
    Unless, perhaps, you are in a coma it is impossible to go anywhere and not learn something. That includes going to college. But there would be no reason for one to single college out amid all the places one goes to learn things. The parent is referring to things that college is seen as being relatively unique in offering.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 331c8c71 4y ago
  > almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost Not quite so for immigrants who are likely prevalent (or close) in grad schools.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• WanderPanda 4y ago
  4. Time spent outside the rat race without leaving a hole in your cv
• morpheuskafka 4y ago
  > fields that don't truly need the education Even if that's true, isn't part of the problem that a lot of those office jobs that don't absolutely need the knowledge still expect a bachelor's degree? Even if it was nothing more than "finishing school," you're going to have a hard time finding a job in HR, sales, etc. without college.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    You are today, but that's because it is a signaling mechanism that you are a reasonably hard worker and willing to put up with bullshit. Also because practically everyone worth hiring has one. This is not a stable equilibrium, though, when you couple it with the tremendous rise in prices.
  • mtrower 4y ago
    What is meant by finishing school in this thread? I have a feeling this is not the definition being used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finishing_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finishing_school
    • FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
      That's exactly what it's referring to, but in a derogatory way, and more gender-neutral. I.e., a place that teaches people how to act professional-class, how to have the correct opinions and prejudices, the correct conditioned responses, the correct verbal tics, and so on.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• suzzer99 4y ago
  I'm an engineer now, but am still very glad I had a liberal arts undergrad.
• m463 4y ago
  I don't think going to college can be easily summed up (and dismissed) with a numbered list of items. Sort of like saying marriage is just to have kids, get a tax benefit, and save on rent.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• dahart 4y ago
  This pessimistic view doesn’t seem that well supported by the data. In the US, we’re pushing nearly 40% of bachelor’s degree attainment, which is far broader a population than you suggest. There’s also the problem that degree holders earn an average of 2x more than non-degree holders. I was very surprised by this! The St. Louis Fed published this statistic in an article arguing that the wealth advantage of college was waning, but it kinda backfired on me when I looked at their absolute numbers. The fact that many many many good jobs require a degree and that earnings are statistically higher for people with degrees, I speculate, is driving college rates far more than all three reasons you proposed, combined… from a students’ perspective.
  • jletienne 4y ago
    it's unclear if the causation here is having a degree. but it is correlated to a very large degree
    • dahart 4y ago
      This has been quite widely studied, actually. Many papers conclude that it’s a mix of causation, there is (unsurprisingly) some amount of actual learning of skills in college, and also (unsurprisingly) some amount of credentialism in the job market. What does it matter though? Parent was presuming to argue from a students’ perspective. The amount of relative causation might be pretty irrelevant to a student who just wants to know what do to to maximize their chances of having a decent career. From a student’s perspective, lack of causation might even be a stronger reason than otherwise, it potentially means they can enjoy a more lucrative career with less work.
      • jedberg 4y ago
        No, the main question is are the highest paid workers getting that because of college, or did the most driven and smartest go to college, and would have been equally successful had no one gone to college? Back in the day (pre-WW2) most successful people did no go to college. College was for wealthy trust fund kids to spend some time meeting other wealthy trust fund kids, because there just weren't all that many colleges nor any need to go. That whole college==more money thing didn't start until after WW2.
• solatic 4y ago
  Not just three uses, but also three fundamentally different offerings: 1. If you're looking for a professional trade school, go to a state school for undergrad. Every elite graduate who joins a BigCo after finishing finds themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with ten state school graduates who paid a fraction as much as they did to get to the same exact place. 2. If you're looking for an elite finishing school, well, there's only so many schools at the top. Ivies or Stanford or bust. If you don't get in, or can't afford to go, well, this route simply isn't open to you. Just don't fool yourself into thinking some small land grant college few people have heard of will give you the same thing. Elite finishing schools are what they are because of the connections you form there, not the educations they offer. 3. You have a much stronger head-start on the rest of the academic market if you start at one of a handful of schools, places like MIT or CalTech. You can, of course, still end up in academia coming from a state school, but it's much, much harder to stand out, much harder to get involved with undergraduate research, much harder to put together a strong academic portfolio not for any graduate school but for connected graduate schools.
• ouid 4y ago
  A university is where you go to be exposed to the most correct way of thinking that we have. Sure, they offer other services, and the administrations of these institutions have turned them into capitalist hellscapes which warp even the original service, but the ultimate point of a university is an apprenticeship. Just in thinking instead of plumbing. This is what education should be, and everyone should receive it. I am not convinced of the value of pre-university education, so perhaps we should just do it earlier. It doesn't scale the way a business typically scales. You can't automate it or fit it under an ever lengthening hierarchy, but it does in fact scale incredibly well. Everyone who is taught to think better can teach others to think better. The market is not correcting itself. The market is destroying the premise of a university.
• irrational 4y ago
  I don’t know. I studied ancient history and historical linguistics in college. I managed to graduate with <$10k in debt because of working multiple jobs, academic scholarships and Pell Grants. Now, I have worked professionally as a programmer for >23 years, but I don’t consider my time in college to be wasted at all. College introduced me to a much more diverse group of people. I got to interact with very smart people on a continuous basis which helped me to think more clearly, more logically, etc.
  • meh8881 4y ago
    People talking about the economics of college and citing their experience from over two decades ago as if it’s supposed to be comparable to today is really frustrating.
    • irrational 4y ago
      The economics wasn’t the important part. The things I learned studying ancient history and linguistics and how those have made me a better person and developer are. I do understand how much tuition has skyrocketed. The year I graduated, tuition was $1,360 per semester. In 2023, tuition is $3,152 per semester. That is a $1,792 increase only 25 years (I graduated in 1998)
      • vxNsr 4y ago
        What school only charges $6300/yr?
        • irrational 4y ago
          http://catalog2022.byu.edu/policy/tuition-fees http://catalog2022.byu.edu/policy/tuition-fees
      • meh8881 4y ago
        The economics are absolutely an important part. Your school is very cheap. That’s nice. But you may well feel differently if you school had been 100x more expensive. Which is not a hyperbolic example.
• jltsiren 4y ago
  4. A socially acceptable excuse for spending a few years learning and doing interesting things, instead of focusing on something more productive in the short term. When I was a student, it was a different time and place (20+ years ago in Finland), but this was a major motivation for many people. Some people didn't have the financial means to take advantage of that, some had too many social obligations, and some were simply not interested in learning. But for many, learning was a major reason for attending a university. And this was not about the elite. In fact, studying a field with a clear professional identity and good prospects for a high-status high-paying job predicted having high-status professional parents and right-wing values. Studying a more academic field was a weaker predictor for left-wing values and middle-class parents. If anything, the elite saw higher education more as an investment, while the middle class was more likely to treat it as an opportunity to do interesting things.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mysterydip 4y ago
  Might be considered part of #2, but "feeder program for professional athletes" would be another goal for some.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Or #1 possibly... The whole American college athletics thing is crazy, and almost completely disjointed from the rest of what "college" is.
• klyrs 4y ago
  > 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) As somebody with a PhD, I say ho hum. I only took on 5 figures of debt, after quitting tech after the "dot com bubble." I had been bored out of my skull with the monotony and lack of intellectual challenge. But 7 figures of opportunity cost? Maybe even more, if I had joined the right startup. But I moved from low tech to high tech, using my degree in industry. Money is nice, sure, and can solve some problems in life. But real value is satisfaction. It doesn't have a price tag. There isn't a number of digits that would make me reconsider my choice. If your primary measure of success is wealth, then university has never been the answer.
  • blululu 4y ago
    15 years is a long time when college tuitions rise by ~10% a year. 6 figure debt is more common than you would like. As for the connection between wealth and university, I would suggest looking at the stats on income and education. You can frequently find them in the admissions literature. Schools/departments brag about favorable career outcomes when selling their services to 17 year olds.
    • kevviiinn 4y ago
      As someone currently doing a PhD, it really isn't that common to see 6 figure student debt. 5 figure yes but that has a range of 10k-99k. Most other students I've spoken to are around 10-30 so I'm not sure where OP is getting their numbers from Tbh I haven't run into a single person with 6 figure debt who didn't go to law or medical school
• rvba 4y ago
  4) Finding spouse of similar background
• thiagoharry 4y ago
  I do not think that what society needs is equal what the market needs. People with critical knowledge about society, philosophy, people that could question how good is the market deciding everything are not interesting to the market, but it is interesting to the society. Without publicly funded education, however, everything boils down to what the market decides.
  • pjlegato 4y ago
    _With_ publicly funded education, however, everything boils down to what some small group of unelected bureaucrats decide. That is arguably much worse. It's also worth noting that most countries with totally free higher education emphatically do NOT allow just anyone to go study any major they like at taxpayer expense. Subjects that have few jobs waiting at the other end are strictly gated by intensely difficult entrance exams designed to weed out all but a small number of students, so that nobody wastes their time getting a degree in a topic where it is unlikely they can ever find employment.
    • than3 4y ago
      Having been a victim of this type of fraud, I'd say definitively worse than arguably. There's no legal recourse, ITT tech showed the world you have to be able to afford lawyers for 15+ years, and even then you can only come to a settlement (not a verdict). GE required physics at all of our local community colleges were structured so the pass rate was 12% one of those years. If student's can't pass without being academically dishonest, regardless of merit, its just state sponsored fraud.
• loldk 4y ago
  [dead]
• credit_guy 4y ago
  0. A four-year recruitment and placement agency.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• than3 4y ago
  Unfortunately, Its almost a certainty that you're wrong about this. They realize #3 has subsumed both #1 and #2 with the added twist of inescapable debt slavery with no deterministic way to complete those degrees. Education is no longer an investment, its a casino with the house winning 80% of the distribution. I'm sure you've heard about weed-out classes where people fail not because of lack of knowledge, but from structure. Apprenticeships are the only alternative to Professional certifications or educational degrees as job qualifiers. The latter two options both have subsumed their original primary purpose and have exchanged those purposes for an overarching profit motive instead while stripping due process and agency. If you know the material you should be able to pass no problem which is what people pay for when they go to college, but instead they are basically bait and switched which is a form of fraud, with no legal recourse in this case. I'm sure some may argue that you can always sue, but look at ITT tech. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardconroy/2022/02/24/report-on-fraud-committed-by-itt-technical-institute-highlights-need-to-protect-student-loan-borrowers-with-stronger-regulation-of-for-profit-colleges/?sh=506448b12fff https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardconroy/2022/02/24/report-...). I know people who have repeatedly failed Mechanics (Physics), while acing multiple heavy math courses above multivariate calculus. Their biggest complaints were non-deterministic questions being asked on those tests, and structural course elements that induce causality spirals. Example of the first being material the material taught is different from what was being tested with no adequate preparation, or in the case of inference there being multiple correct answers without enough information provided to deterministically come to a single correct answer, or in the case of heuristics where you build a context (or initial set of conditions) and that context should only lead to one answer but has multiple correct answers (with some uncommunicated assumption). They were all extremely upset because the tests amount to guesses, and some have repeated the same course every semester with different professors (same structural elements) over 3-5 years, even going so far as to take the course at different district colleges (same structural issues) before dropping out entirely due to the additional financial burden with no path forward. Examples of the latter being, the answer of the second problem is dependent on the correct answer to the first, the answer of the third problem is dependent on the correct answer to the second. An arbitrarily uncommunicated rounding scheme guarantees most fail. It might seem from the way I've said this that they just gave up, but it wasn't from lack of trying. Some escalated this from the Chairperson, to the Dean, to the Board of Directors over several years. Ultimately, no corrective action was taken, and its not a new story. This is why people are generally not going to college and opting for other consistent options.
• User23 4y ago
  You forgot 4. Party sex camp.
• troyvit 4y ago
  This is messed up and gendered today but when I went to school in the '90s people would add a 4th use, saying some women were in college to get their MRS (ie. just find somebody to marry). No clue if it's like that today. Also I don't get why a dude couldn't do the same thing.
• hintymad 4y ago
  Yet in the meantime UCLA got 146K applications this year, and UCSD more than 130K. Students with 4.3+ weighted GPAs and 15+ APs still got rejected. UC's admission officers (AO) in their pubic talks made it clear that academic performance account for only 40% in admission, extracurricular activities another 40%, and personality 20%. So, UC systems give AOs 60% of the discretion! How is it different from the garbage Xiaolian System that Chinese used before the Tang dynasty? But I digressed. The point is the demand for top-tier university is nothing but higher.
  • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    it should generally have the long term effect of making a slightly lower ranked school better ranked in the long term because all the smart rejects go there.
• te_chris 4y ago
  The payoff to the finishing school part is different if you’re not in the US where the cost is now insane.
• lanza 4y ago
  I'd definitely explicitly add business to the first entry. Sure you can work in business without a degree, but the experience with the mathematics and ideas that you learn is definitely a huge benefit.
• eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I’m just a HS graduate who should’ve failed my senior year, and I may well have dropped out of HS if I could go back and do it again. So, an enormous grain of salt should accompany what I’m about to say. I think the benefits of a liberal arts education are probably worth everything its proponents say. Having a well rounded education, which exposes one to not just new ideas but an openness to new ways of thinking, is invaluable. I’ve hobbled together what I can from earnest interest (and some free courses from universities which opened up their lectures), and I’ve grown a lot from that. I hesitate to imagine how much more I’d have benefited from college being described not as a vehicle for future success but as a part of becoming a person in a world that only gets more complex—with age, responsibility, and time in a society. I lucked out on the career front, but a more formal and broad education is something I really regret not pursuing at the time it most fit my life trajectory. And I think everyone benefits from that spirit of education continuing to exist.
  • csomar 4y ago
    This "broad" education can be useful, but not in a vacuum. It would be better if you are a technician, engineer or whatever and you pursue some kind of liberal art education; or say societal/psychological studies; or English studies, etc... The point is, the real world still needs you to be productive in different things. You'd better have that first, get some real world experience and then expand your career horizontally by getting into these fields. I think the mistake is that some people have been pursuing these career in a vacuum and also took a lot of debt while doing it. So while they might have had an interesting experience while at college, they are not of much use in the outside world.
  • rayiner 4y ago
    > Having a well rounded education, which exposes one to not just new ideas but an openness to new ways of thinking, is invaluable. In what way is it invaluable?
    • nequo 4y ago
      In the way that it keeps giving well after you graduate from college.
• jimbokun 4y ago
  4. Extending adolescence 4 more years, slowing down the transition to full adulthood.
• t-3 4y ago
  > they could otherwise have had great careers in fields that don't truly need the education you get from a college. What fields? I can't even get an interview for any job that isn't factory/grocery/warehouse because I don't have a degree. That useless piece of paper opens doors.
• ideamotor 4y ago
  The top three benefits of college have nothing to do with anything you mentioned.
• cutler 4y ago
  "The market is correcting itself". It seems Adam Smith's Invisible Hand has left no stone unturned but the paradox is that soon his ideas, along with those of Keynes, Marx, Ricardo, Galbraith and Friedman will only be familiar to the elites who can afford a purely academic education which we, here in the UK, received free for 25 years after 1962. The rest will be chasing their accountancy or AI qualifications, discussing quantitative techniques in the Students Union bar instead of arguing about current affairs and joining campaigns. A sad contrast with the colourful intellectual climate of the 70s in UK universities. I returned to visit my old university recently only to find the campus full of soul-less franchises and real refectories replaced with a single pay-as-you-go food outlet. The post-it-note-plastered walls of the Students Union I knew have gone, replaced with framed commercial advertising. The population has increased four-fold since I was there yet the Philosophy department is threatened with closure. I kinda knew I had it good while I was there but not how good. I watched Thatcher's reforms gradually erode the student grant in the 80s but no-one could have predicted university life would end-up where it is now with students dependent on unscrupulous landlords hiking rents well above what student loans will cover.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• hayst4ck 4y ago
  There is truth to your jaded view, you can't just pay money to live on easy street. I had peers who just copied other peoples homework or other similarly self defeating behavior. They paid for education and chose not to get any. The paper degree doesn't have any value at all. It is the pain and agony of sipping on the firehouse of knowledge and the quite literal shared trauma of the whole experience that are the indicators of value. The most important lesson I learned in college is just because something feels right doesn't mean it is. Just about everything has deep complexity and nuance. If I am not studied in a field, I am probably drawing conclusions from a place of ignorance. Education is about suppressing our animal natures in order to have a better, more direct, more correct understanding of reality. Education is about destruction of delusions through systematic inquiry and critical thinking. Good education doesn't tell you what to think, but how to think, how to question yourself. It explains why things are the way they are. It is one thing to say "we stand on the shoulders of giants." But it is truly an experience to actually see the giants that we stand on. Once you spend time outside of the US you learn about the value of education. You learn about high trust vs low trust societies. You learn that people with simple views of the world produce poverty and strife. Educated people outside of the US want to immigrate to the US because of our educated population. They want to escape the consequences of their poorly educated neighbors. The mark of an uneducated person is that they think they are experts in fields they are not. Educated peopled don't want to be around that. Educated people don't want to be ruled by that. Educated people want to be around other educated people. Before you indict college education, I would encourage you to visit several poor countries and ask yourself why they are the way they are. It's obviously not as simple as poor education, but thinking about how education relates to poverty at a societal level and how education influences a society from a systemic perspective might improve your opinion of education. I took an engineering path, but when I think back on what I value from my education, it's not the technical training. I was handed opportunities I never would have had otherwise, access to some of the top experts in the world, and freedom proportional to the level of responsibility I took. College was the first time in my life I was ever around peers or people I considered smarter than myself. I am sad that your experience with education has produced the grim view of education being purely functional, I believe college is truly what you make of it.
• beowulfey 4y ago
  I agree completely but wanted to add a fourth point, which is that college is a necessary stepping stone for most professional sports.
• jasmer 4y ago
  If we're going to be cynical, then #4, the most common, which is 'post-secondary perfunctory education' basically 'advanced high school' which society 'expects' people to perform. Someone pointed out the legitimacy of learning and expanding one's horizons, kind of the 'ideal' which I suggest does happen in most circumstances. But #4 is the most common. 'It's the thing the upper 1/3 have to do'. So you half blindly pick a thing, and then get through it. That said, not only do we need more 'apprenticiships' - we need more such professionalization in the white collar world as well, and the processs should be more organized. Like Germany. I say this with not an ounce of envy, but the Ivy League cartels need to be broken up. There is way too much that we put into that symbol, it's just to momentus, it weighs like a finger on the scale and creates a kind of unhealthy elitism.
• taco_philips 4y ago
  [dead]
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  > A lot of people have been tricked into going to general education and liberal arts college programs (the finishing school parts) without the money to pay in full under the guise of "becoming a lifelong learner" or something This rush for everybody to complete a college education arguably wasn't caused by some kind of natural cultural phenomenon, but was an artificial intervention in the employment market. The Supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power Company was a landmark employment discrimination case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, high school diplomas and intelligence test scores such as IQ tests were judged to be no longer allowed to be used as prerequisites for employment. In an environment where companies are scared of testing IQs and easily proving a job-seekers basic competency, it's easy to see how a "college degree" became the standard proxy for proving basic competency and somebody having the ability to be trained for a non-trivial job. And as a society, that's been a jaw-droppingly awful trade. Rather than take maybe a few tests when you start to look for a white collar job: we've compelled all of of our youth to attend at least 4 years of education that they usually don't need (wasting 4 years of income-earning potential), and to go deep into debt as the basic standard of life. This has many unbelievably negative second order effects on the world, including drastic consequences for the most responsible people starting families.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  I did one of those supposedly useless liberal arts programs and now work in a totally different field. But all the connections I made along the way are still super useful and I also gained a ton of other knowledge and skills along the way. Would it be worth going into massive debt for? Probably not.