7 ms·

The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned econo

The liberal arts model was intended for the elites, and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy. But there is also the Humboldtian model of higher education, which focuses on educating informed citizens who are free to make their own choices. Learning vocational skills is easy enough if you have good education, and it's also necessary to be able to do that outside school, as careers rarely last a lifetime. American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.

nukem222 2y ago
> useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down. But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.
jselysianeagle 2y ago
> American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself. There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.
- nradov 2y ago
  The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.
gruez 2y ago
>the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy ???
- delusional 2y ago
  It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human. We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.
  - newAccount2025 2y ago
    Beautifully put. It feels like a view we sorely need as our corporate overlords become AI enabled.
  - RevEng 2y ago
    Why not both? If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively. Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses. We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      Some countries have alternatives. For example, Finland has institutes that call themselves polytechnics, universities of applied sciences, or something similar. ~60% of higher education takes place in them, with the remaining 40% in research universities. However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.
chermi 2y ago
Another reason they're expensive is because the government basically guarantees they'll pay for whatever tuition the universities set, so they raise prices. There's lot of other factors, including administrative bloat, and maybe partially from less funding... But they're still funded in large part by the government via loans. I don't know the right answer, but I know it's not simply more government funding.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  They also don't pay taxes because of a supreme court decision in favor of MIT for being a "Charity" and reducing tuition for some. Then every Uni piled on and decided to use a lot of that money on sports.
  - beacon294 2y ago
    Historically sports was self paying and a massive benefit. I don't know what the score has been for the last 2 decades.
    - downrightmike 2y ago
      When everything else is starving, it doesn't make sense to keep sports constantly upgrading
KurSix 2y ago
Defunding public institutions while glorifying prestige has created a system where access is limited and value is warped
blueflow 2y ago
> and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I disagree. I get food from the supermarket, my roof is built by someone else, unlimited water from the faucet. This stuff isn't coming for free, it is other peoples work. Of course i want to learn something useful to contribute back. But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  So what is more efficient for this? : 4 years going in debt to get a well rounded education with a concentration in learning maybe 1.5 years of welding (in theory): or 2-3 years as an apprentice learning your specific trade and focusing on your one task (not in how many credits needed to graduate)? We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets. But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.
  - xnx 2y ago
    > they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. Exactly. Privatize profits. Socialize costs.
- jmoak 2y ago
  >But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that. We do, it's called the price of labor. We currently need highly educated healthcare professionals like a forest fire needs rain. These wages are literally off the chart: BLS list: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm Another list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-careers.aspx?&persist=true&location=US&curpage=1&pagesize=500 https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-c...
rendang 2y ago
Subsidizing a service with public funds does not make it less expensive, it only changes who pays the expense.
- wormlord 2y ago
  What is economy of scale? What is induced demand? What is return on investment? What is increased total innovation?

nukem222 2y ago

> useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I'd still strongly prefer a totalitarian, planned economy. Hell it sounds like a straight-up pollyannish fantasy at this point. Watching people expect the chaos of building our country around the right-to-be-a-dick-to-others to result in a functional country makes me want to burn everything down. But making your own labor force pay for their education? Straight suicidal.

jselysianeagle 2y ago

> American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself. There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.

nradov 2y ago
The massive sports funding is mostly only a thing for D1 schools and it doesn't take much funding away from academics. The sports mostly pay for themselves through ticket sales and media licensing, with the big chunks of revenue coming from men's football and basketball. Sports also drive a lot of alumni donations.

gruez 2y ago

>the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy ???

delusional 2y ago
It's a worldview that necessitates only teaching what leads to a job. It is anti beauty and anti human. We are not machines of production. We are human beings, we deserve to learn stuff that doesn't help us produce.
- newAccount2025 2y ago
  Beautifully put. It feels like a view we sorely need as our corporate overlords become AI enabled.
- RevEng 2y ago
  Why not both? If I want to learn how to do something, I want to be educated in that. There should be education available for that, but for knowledge workers, there largely isn't; instead, university has been hijacked to fill that role. In the trades there are schools dedicated to learning these topics and they work well at helping people learn to work effectively. Universities should be a place of higher learning and research - those are really important too. The struggle in universities today is that they are expected to be both and those things aren't really compatible. That's why you get research professors begrudgingly teaching undergraduate courses. We need an alternative to universities for learning the trades that knowledge workers tend to do.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Some countries have alternatives. For example, Finland has institutes that call themselves polytechnics, universities of applied sciences, or something similar. ~60% of higher education takes place in them, with the remaining 40% in research universities. However, when similar fields of study are available in both types of institutes, employers almost universally prefer graduates from research universities.

chermi 2y ago

Another reason they're expensive is because the government basically guarantees they'll pay for whatever tuition the universities set, so they raise prices. There's lot of other factors, including administrative bloat, and maybe partially from less funding... But they're still funded in large part by the government via loans. I don't know the right answer, but I know it's not simply more government funding.

downrightmike 2y ago
They also don't pay taxes because of a supreme court decision in favor of MIT for being a "Charity" and reducing tuition for some. Then every Uni piled on and decided to use a lot of that money on sports.
- beacon294 2y ago
  Historically sports was self paying and a massive benefit. I don't know what the score has been for the last 2 decades.
  - downrightmike 2y ago
    When everything else is starving, it doesn't make sense to keep sports constantly upgrading

KurSix 2y ago

Defunding public institutions while glorifying prestige has created a system where access is limited and value is warped

blueflow 2y ago

> and the idea of education as means of producing useful workers is straight from a totalitarian planned economy I disagree. I get food from the supermarket, my roof is built by someone else, unlimited water from the faucet. This stuff isn't coming for free, it is other peoples work. Of course i want to learn something useful to contribute back. But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
So what is more efficient for this? : 4 years going in debt to get a well rounded education with a concentration in learning maybe 1.5 years of welding (in theory): or 2-3 years as an apprentice learning your specific trade and focusing on your one task (not in how many credits needed to graduate)? We had this structure with apprenticeships. Companies were the ones to say "we need x people with Y mindset". And they can pay to foster those people and mindsets. But they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. They instead put up with mediocre welders they kinda sorta train for 6 months and maybe the good ones stay. Great model for society.
- xnx 2y ago
  > they abandoned that because they didn't want to fit the bill for their own workforce. Exactly. Privatize profits. Socialize costs.
jmoak 2y ago
>But western societies don't seem to have a "We need X people with Y skillset" institution. If someone came to me like, "we need a welder to produce $needed_thing" then i would have put my skill points into that. We do, it's called the price of labor. We currently need highly educated healthcare professionals like a forest fire needs rain. These wages are literally off the chart: BLS list: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm Another list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-careers.aspx?&persist=true&location=US&curpage=1&pagesize=500 https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Wages/highest-paying-c...

rendang 2y ago

Subsidizing a service with public funds does not make it less expensive, it only changes who pays the expense.

wormlord 2y ago
What is economy of scale? What is induced demand? What is return on investment? What is increased total innovation?