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Echoing the sentiments of others here, this is why I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life. Formal education just works better fo

Echoing the sentiments of others here, this is why I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life. Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning, and ensuring everyone is able to learn new things and practice their skills in a consequence-free environment benefits society as a whole. Think about the tech nerds (me) who never learned how to cook, and are in their thirties. Or lawyers and Doctors who are sick and tired of feeling like they don’t understand how computers work, and want to learn. Or an accountant who loves maths, and wants to get into the scientific side of the field. Or the homemaker who wants to re-enter the workforce now that their kids are grown, and wants to pick up carpentry and welding to become a tradesperson. If cognitive decline comes from failing to practice it regularly, then the cheapest solution is free education for life to encourage as many people as possible to keep learning new skills and remain cognitively engaged.

jdefr89 2y ago
I am 100% with you. I am great engineering wise.. Have no clue how to eat and live healthy!
- stego-tech 2y ago
  You're not alone! Nobody knows everything, and what's important or necessary to our thriving changes constantly throughout our lives. Learning to cook wasn't high on that list when tech salaries were great, delivery was cheap, and housing wasn't (completely) unaffordable; now that I'm nearing my 40s and have to stretch even a six-figure salary further than before, suddenly learning to cook is a necessity. Good people are always changing in some way. Making public education free encourages lifelong learning and builds a more adaptable human for times of crises. It's good survival strategy, that also just happens to create a more fulfilled human being.
morning-coffee 2y ago
> I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? (Hint, you're not going to pop-out of those 4 years with any skills that are differentiated enough from everyone else who took-up the "free" education and not be right back in the same position you are now.) If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate. Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies), filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected public universities), both (other public universities), or offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the degree means something.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my experiences, the modern degree is little more than a gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy background (stronger social networks for other rich folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a caste system). You're 100% right that a modern American High School Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency, because standards were constantly refined downward to promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees (and many technology certifications) are much the same, providing little more than a demonstration of taking on debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being a functional worker. So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects are given priority over those seeking non-professional growth. There's a lot of wiggle room to be had, if we're serious about opening this up.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year. It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work. > Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?" Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in. So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising. > Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes. The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible? > If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either. Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive. If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.
Sxubas 2y ago
Chat gpt is already free to a very generous extent, and covers 80% (if not more) of the learning resources you could need for almost any topic, theory-wise. I'd risk saying it can adapt for most people's needs. For practical knowledge you just need to do it over and over. A good mentor/teacher would help a lot, but the very very basics I'd say are learnable by yourself. It's as simple as doing it over and over and keeping a critical eye on what went good and not. As a result, I don't think free public colleges would enable more people to -actually- learn compared to what we have today. However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  See, I'm worried about relying on LLMs for learning given their penchant for hallucinations and the early studies showing they're actually bad for learning or cognitive improvement, since they remove the "research" and "critical thinking" phases of problem solving for entry-level stuff - fundamental skills that are necessary to put something into practice independently and learn from mistakes. Sure, teachers/professors can also make stuff up (and often with more damage given their position as a "reliable authority"), but in a classroom setting it feels like that'd be found out faster than using a ChatGPT that's spitting out bad results. > However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days. This is what a lot of detractors seem to miss about the benefits of in-person learning. Team projects force you to interact with strangers and cooperate for the benefit of the whole. Campuses increase the likelihood of chance encounters. They get you out of your home and into the community, which helps you feel connected to your actions and their outcomes. The knock-on effects are often greater than the immediate benefits.
buzzert 2y ago
> Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning I don’t agree with this at all. Anecdotally, the autodidacts I’ve met are way more knowledgeable about subjects they’re passionate about compared to those who received a formal education for it. This applies to both computer science, but also psychology majors who I’ve met who can’t even tell me the difference between Freud and Jung.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  I mean, you can disagree with it based on your anecdata, but mine backs up my assertion which is why I made (and qualified) it the way I did. I specifically thrive in live sessions with an instructor knowledgeable on the material who can provide direct feedback, and I am not the only one. "Works better" is a qualifier on the effectiveness of the education on an individual, not the effectiveness of it on all individuals. The key to learning accessibility is flexibility. Some thrive on self-study, some thrive on video tutorials, some thrive on audio lectures and others in live exercises. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this also applied to specific topics: fundamentals of cooking might be better via live instruction, while iterating on a recipe is often fine with self-study or video tutorials. The point is the flexibility, to allow people to learn in a way that's best for them, so they're more likely to continue learning throughout their lives.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > I don’t agree with this at all. Are you actually saying that nobody exists who learns better when taught in the best ways we currently know how to teach, and in the way all formal education currently works? That everyone is better off teaching themselves with no help? You are disagreeing if and only if this is what you are saying.
- Unearned5161 2y ago
  you're saying you don't agree with it, but then go on to talk about something entirely unrelated. op isn't saying self paced learning doesn't work for anyone, therefore it's irrelevant if you know some whizz autodidacts
- randcraw 2y ago
rsanek 2y ago
I don't think I should be paying for others to study simply because they prefer a different modality of learning, especially when it has been found that learning modality selection has nearly zero impact on actual learning outcomes. Now, if this was structured as a negative tax system, where eg everyone after graduating high school starts with -$10k in taxable income for a handful of years, perhaps that could avoid punishing those that choose to self-study.
- stouset 2y ago
  This line of reasoning can be used, unmodified, to argue against essentially all of public education. An educated populace is an inherent good. There’s nothing magic about the particular choice of K-12, and one could very convincingly argue that with the increasing complexity of modern life and increasing expectations from employers that ongoing adult education is also a net good, even when you’re not the recipient. Ongoing education can also be vocational for those who aren’t inclined towards typical academia. Cynically, one can also point to the current political administration of the U.S. (and the comparative education rates for its voters) as a case in point for why education is important.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    Very well said. Education, at its core, is about adapting the species to better survive the increasingly complex world it creates and inhabits. Failing to educate the whole means exposing it to fracture and exploitation from within. It’s inoculation against exploitation, a mental vaccine that, when done right, promotes cooperation over self-interest. Which is exactly why those who are threatened by it, seek to restrict or destroy it.
  - borgdefenser 2y ago
    You can already take classes for free on youtube from the best instructors in the world at the best universities. What more do you want? People just like to complain about political issues as a type of entertainment.
    - 2y ago

jdefr89 2y ago

I am 100% with you. I am great engineering wise.. Have no clue how to eat and live healthy!

stego-tech 2y ago
You're not alone! Nobody knows everything, and what's important or necessary to our thriving changes constantly throughout our lives. Learning to cook wasn't high on that list when tech salaries were great, delivery was cheap, and housing wasn't (completely) unaffordable; now that I'm nearing my 40s and have to stretch even a six-figure salary further than before, suddenly learning to cook is a necessity. Good people are always changing in some way. Making public education free encourages lifelong learning and builds a more adaptable human for times of crises. It's good survival strategy, that also just happens to create a more fulfilled human being.

morning-coffee 2y ago

> I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? (Hint, you're not going to pop-out of those 4 years with any skills that are differentiated enough from everyone else who took-up the "free" education and not be right back in the same position you are now.) If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.

dehrmann 2y ago
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate. Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies), filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected public universities), both (other public universities), or offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the degree means something.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my experiences, the modern degree is little more than a gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy background (stronger social networks for other rich folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a caste system). You're 100% right that a modern American High School Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency, because standards were constantly refined downward to promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees (and many technology certifications) are much the same, providing little more than a demonstration of taking on debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being a functional worker. So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects are given priority over those seeking non-professional growth. There's a lot of wiggle room to be had, if we're serious about opening this up.
stego-tech 2y ago
> I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year. It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work. > Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?" Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in. So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising. > Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes. The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible? > If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either. Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive. If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.

Sxubas 2y ago

Chat gpt is already free to a very generous extent, and covers 80% (if not more) of the learning resources you could need for almost any topic, theory-wise. I'd risk saying it can adapt for most people's needs. For practical knowledge you just need to do it over and over. A good mentor/teacher would help a lot, but the very very basics I'd say are learnable by yourself. It's as simple as doing it over and over and keeping a critical eye on what went good and not. As a result, I don't think free public colleges would enable more people to -actually- learn compared to what we have today. However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.

stego-tech 2y ago
See, I'm worried about relying on LLMs for learning given their penchant for hallucinations and the early studies showing they're actually bad for learning or cognitive improvement, since they remove the "research" and "critical thinking" phases of problem solving for entry-level stuff - fundamental skills that are necessary to put something into practice independently and learn from mistakes. Sure, teachers/professors can also make stuff up (and often with more damage given their position as a "reliable authority"), but in a classroom setting it feels like that'd be found out faster than using a ChatGPT that's spitting out bad results. > However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days. This is what a lot of detractors seem to miss about the benefits of in-person learning. Team projects force you to interact with strangers and cooperate for the benefit of the whole. Campuses increase the likelihood of chance encounters. They get you out of your home and into the community, which helps you feel connected to your actions and their outcomes. The knock-on effects are often greater than the immediate benefits.

buzzert 2y ago

> Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning I don’t agree with this at all. Anecdotally, the autodidacts I’ve met are way more knowledgeable about subjects they’re passionate about compared to those who received a formal education for it. This applies to both computer science, but also psychology majors who I’ve met who can’t even tell me the difference between Freud and Jung.

stego-tech 2y ago
I mean, you can disagree with it based on your anecdata, but mine backs up my assertion which is why I made (and qualified) it the way I did. I specifically thrive in live sessions with an instructor knowledgeable on the material who can provide direct feedback, and I am not the only one. "Works better" is a qualifier on the effectiveness of the education on an individual, not the effectiveness of it on all individuals. The key to learning accessibility is flexibility. Some thrive on self-study, some thrive on video tutorials, some thrive on audio lectures and others in live exercises. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this also applied to specific topics: fundamentals of cooking might be better via live instruction, while iterating on a recipe is often fine with self-study or video tutorials. The point is the flexibility, to allow people to learn in a way that's best for them, so they're more likely to continue learning throughout their lives.
pessimizer 2y ago
> I don’t agree with this at all. Are you actually saying that nobody exists who learns better when taught in the best ways we currently know how to teach, and in the way all formal education currently works? That everyone is better off teaching themselves with no help? You are disagreeing if and only if this is what you are saying.
Unearned5161 2y ago
you're saying you don't agree with it, but then go on to talk about something entirely unrelated. op isn't saying self paced learning doesn't work for anyone, therefore it's irrelevant if you know some whizz autodidacts
randcraw 2y ago

rsanek 2y ago

I don't think I should be paying for others to study simply because they prefer a different modality of learning, especially when it has been found that learning modality selection has nearly zero impact on actual learning outcomes. Now, if this was structured as a negative tax system, where eg everyone after graduating high school starts with -$10k in taxable income for a handful of years, perhaps that could avoid punishing those that choose to self-study.

stouset 2y ago
This line of reasoning can be used, unmodified, to argue against essentially all of public education. An educated populace is an inherent good. There’s nothing magic about the particular choice of K-12, and one could very convincingly argue that with the increasing complexity of modern life and increasing expectations from employers that ongoing adult education is also a net good, even when you’re not the recipient. Ongoing education can also be vocational for those who aren’t inclined towards typical academia. Cynically, one can also point to the current political administration of the U.S. (and the comparative education rates for its voters) as a case in point for why education is important.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  Very well said. Education, at its core, is about adapting the species to better survive the increasingly complex world it creates and inhabits. Failing to educate the whole means exposing it to fracture and exploitation from within. It’s inoculation against exploitation, a mental vaccine that, when done right, promotes cooperation over self-interest. Which is exactly why those who are threatened by it, seek to restrict or destroy it.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  You can already take classes for free on youtube from the best instructors in the world at the best universities. What more do you want? People just like to complain about political issues as a type of entertainment.
  - 2y ago