Stupid ass private education bullshit
It doesn’t. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.
I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you’ll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you’re familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.
It doesn’t.
It takes time and effort to gain more knowledge. It has never been cheaper or more accessible to acquire knowledge than it is today.
To increase your intelligence, is another matter all together.
I would also add that damn near all of human information is free to be had on the internet for the low, low price of a monthly broadband bill. The real expense comes when you want a piece of paper that says you know all this that other people will take seriously.
While absolutely true. I would say it’s much harder to find today than ten years ago. The Internet as an information source is being degraded on a daily basis. The amount of misinformation, ads disguised as information, and AI slop is destroying your ability to find that information.
Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free. You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.
It’s true for infotaiment stuff but for boring knowladge not so much. If you seek textbooks and recordings of lectures, there is still a lot of great stuff out there. It’s boring as ditch water but boring is good.
I guess you’re talking about the US.
Well, everything costs money there: education, health, safety… It’s capitalist dystopia.
In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.
Education is now one of Australia’s main exports.
same in US, most of them seek out international rich students, and you can see how much of these from the middle east and asian coming in with thier expensive cars to campus everyday. at the same time they neglect the rest of the students, so they dont prepare them for thier career track as there is very little resources directing to the departments, just enough to get by so the Professors and staff dont “revolt”, they also abuse the adjunct positions to avoid paying them full time, or more benefits, if they can replace all the instructors with masters or BS level educations they would instead of getting PHDs. it all goes to wooeing international students, and sports. stem needs lab work as experience, but its so limited and small most graduating dont even know about it, or its extremely hard to get into. you can tell the university is being cheap if they use overworked professors to do advising.
Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.
It is wild to me that tuition is SO expensive and quality educational content is SO ubiquitous now. It does take a lot of time, skill, and effort to provide quality educational experiences, but man is it weird that it is simultaneously free and ridiculously overpriced.
University is overpriced, but a degree isn’t just saying that you’ve gained knowledge. Being able to look up and memorize stuff doesn’t mean you’ll be good employee. if you can’t work effectively with a team or tend not to finish a project all the knowledge in the world means nothing.
The most important thing most degrees demonstrate is that you can work for years on a project with multiple milestones involving multiple disciplines, work with others or self-direct, and meet goals.
alot of people fall into the trap of easy degree, like psychology, a studies/arts degree. yea you arnt going anywhere with a psych degree, if your not academically preparing for grad school like PSY-D, or psychology doctorate. i witnessed quite a few people that got a degree, and then complain about it. i had a cousin that did her psych degree properly, she has a PSY-D a while a go.
there is a suggestion going around in other forums,communities, that schools should start holding talks or seminars about different majors, and thier job prospects, but we know they wouldnt, because it would scare people away from these degrees that are money makers and coporations can abuse/exploit low wages for many fields.
Yes, agreed. Definitely value there. I feel like a huge part of university is demonstrating the ability to learn and apply oneself. So many people have success (like myself) in areas that they did not major in.
One thing that I think is actually an argument for big state schools vs private, more expensive lib arts schools is that the big state schools provide you skills in navigating “a System” and that does help when you get into the real world and the damn corporate rat race. Smaller liberal art schools might have more academic competition maybe, but less bureaucratic competition, in many cases. In many cases bureaucratic navigation skills, which are often more valuable in job applicants IRL.
Most impressive are folks that have gathered both the book smarts and the world navigation smarts without the need of higher education institutions and carved their path without going into huge debt or getting carried by rich parents who paid for their degree.
we had a bunch of gifted students in HS, or high performing, i believe we only had 1 gifted per semester/class. they were “paraded around” the school like they were best of the school, while at the same time neglecting the underperfoming struggling students, which is quite a large part of the student body.
our state schools in the wests, apparently were suffering from enrollment deficiencies so they decided to raise tuition (equivalent to dorms), covid exposed unmasked the problem with the schools thats been ongoing before the pandemic. basically people were graduating in the early-mid or late pandemic and they dint learn anything or dint have a chance to get any experience, so they all but criticized the schools, and probably warned thier family hs students away from university.
as of recently the state universities started to enticing hs students of early easier admissions, if they complete these x amount of courses. I dint follow up if the tuition is higher for these students as well. Some students criticized these state school, transferred to a more prestigious university for better opportunities. what universities need to do for stem is increasing the resources for LAB WORK, like make opportunities for more lap spaces,etc, this is the most important part of a major.
Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Here in Sweden education is free
Free at point of service. But it’s 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
That link doesn’t work because you can’t add a %27 in a title.
Works for me on both Jerboa and the web interface. Maybe it’s an issue with your client?
I’m using
Voyager(edit: Thunder. I can’t believe I missed that). For some reason, it adds a 25 between the % and the 27.Also using Thunder - same issue here.
25 is hex for % so it somehow url encodes it again
My jerboa fails
yes you can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding%27 is an url encoded ’
Whatever browser can’t handle that has quite a serious compliance issue.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what’s the point of public coffers if they aren’t being spent on public good?
I’m pretty sure you’re missing some sarcasm
More efficient for whom?
That would be the people paying less tax…
You can’t just compare GDP spendings and call it efficiency without accounting for the output.
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden? Otherwise it’s comparing apples to pears.
Not that efficiency is the top priority in my book, but sure, it’s not an unimportant metric by any means.
edit: … am I being Poe’s lawed here?
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden?
I guess that depends on how you value “Business School” as an education model.
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I’ll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; “a rising tide lifts all boats” society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
I believe New Zealand does this as well?
I got beat for refusing to work in a mall hanging clothing while the “school” took my pay for my education at sped ed. Sweden should think about running things here instead…
I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.
Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.
Or in some cases, like FOSS, the knowledge is freely available, but you pay for a detailed course or tutorial to receive that information in a simpler, more streamlined way.
A lot of the time I paid to have it taught to me so badly that I would have been better off with a textbook. 😢
They then call me up once every few years to ask for a donation! Fk off, I’m still paying off the loan!
Exactly. Smarter doesn’t equate well educated.
Yuuuup. Piece of paper literally to get a higher paying job. Only says you attended school, doesn’t mean you learned anything or built skills there.
The library is free, my dude
Formal education isn’t for education but for the formal paper. There is so much information on the web, just learn from that. Also, libraries often times have material other than physical books
Formal education can be good for guidance. For learning the “unknown unknowns” as a famous scholar once said. Also, in terms of career, networking is the most important thing. The world is built on nepotism, unfortunately.
It doesn’t.
You need to study to be smart and studying is free.
Check out this pedantic guy over here. Just to be clear, knowledge means shit, it’s the diploma that counts
Yeah okay but OP is asking why it costs money to become smarter. The answer is: it doesn’t. But it does cost money to get help with getting smarter and to get a certificate that you did get smarter. And that does indeed cost more than it should in many places
I guarantee you, knowledge means something. You need the degree to get the job, but if you don’t know your ass for your elbow, that entry level job is as far as you are going to go. If you want a promotion and pay raise, you need to know your shit.
… in america.
Everywhere. You can’t go to Europe and claim to be a doctor cause you read all the books for free
In healthcare, yes. An IT guy, a plumber, an analyst, no. Legal and healthcare are the only two fields I can think of right now that a person with enough knowledge couldn’t enter without a diploma.
But those two fields make up what, 1 percent?Also, I don’t need to go to europe, because I’m already there.
There are many other fields that require a degree. Engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology, etc. In some of those fields you can find some jobs which you can do without the degree, but the vast majority do require it.
I hire people and, to be fair, most people with a degree do not qualify as valid for certain jobs. But in that case is lack of knowledge. In my case I’d rather have someone without degree but with a deep knowledge; but those are very hard to find.
Ok, first off, I don’t give a shit who you are or what you do, that’s not what this is about and unless your job has to do with looking at such topics in a scientific and non subjective way, which I did not read from you, your opinion matters just as much as anyone elses, just like mine.
Coming back to nicer grounds, yes, for the fields you have mentioned, that’s absolutely true. Those fields are quite critical and in my opinion should be gated by a diploma. You don’t just get to call yourself and architect and draft a building that collapses. Same with a chemist and accidentally poisoning the groundwater or being a scientist in general and wasting a lot of time and money, and so on. Also, please notice how I said I couldn’t think of any more, just genuinely low effort, was not meaning to say there weren’t.
I think that generally any job that has no immediate severe repercussions and where your employer can reasonably give you a probabtion period, you can just go ahead and do with enough knowledge. Such include (I’m only listing exotic ones, since that’s what we’re seemingly focusing on in this thread):
Technical writer
Salesperson
Consultant
Data Analyst
Project ManagerAnd in europe there is literally no gate to entry to lower level jobs like technical support or warehouse. Keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not in the position to be a lawyer or a scientist.
But even with all that considered, my point still stands: The jobs you can’t do without a diploma, that’s like 1% of jobs. (Likely incorrect percentage)
Aaaand on top of that, when you’re in europe, you don’t even really have to go to uni. Sure, there are lectures you need to technically be present for, but you can just go, say you’re there, then leave. Then you have to pay like in the lower end of a few thousand bucks, which the university will even just straight up give to you if you’re poor and you can just take your exams. I don’t see nothing wrong with the exams, they’re good in any way.
What’s the problem here is the privatization of job opportunities, which for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist on this side of the lake. This is a uniquely american problem we’re talking about here.
I hIrE pEoPlE
The discussion was about the importance of a degree into finding a job. I hire people to work in research to develop novel drugs. I generally do not care whether they have a degree or not, but the degree does generally come with a level of preparation on the subject and a level of reasoning skills which are not easy to develop without formal training/working in the field. I did some times favor people without a degree over people with a PhD because they felt better candidates to me. Sometimes this is not possible due to bureaucracy. If you prefer, I do not actually hire people; I select people that should be hired with grant money I obtained to conduct certain research jobs.
I don’t know how it works in the US, but to get a job in sales or as a project manager a degree is not required where I live. Candidates with a degree may be favoured by a company, but there is no law enforcing the requirement for a degree. And I do know many people working those jobs without a degree.
Regarding the fact that you don’t need to go to university in Europe. I’m not really sure if I understand, I guess you mean it is not compulsory to attend lectures. I studied in Italy, there this was the case: all lectures were absolutely discretionary and you could finish your degree without attending a single one. That is except experimental stuff, which indeed you’d need to attend. You could theoretically just study from the books and pass all the exams and get your degree. However, lectures are very good for understanding what you’re studying, most people were attending all lectures anyway. The fact that those are optional is useful if some days you can not attend for whatever reason, whether you’re working or busy in some other way. This, however, is not the case throughout Europe. I live in Spain now, where attendance of lectures is compulsory. You do not get a degree unless you attend a specified percentage of the lectures. Many other countries in Europe follow this system.
In some countries in Europe you do not pay to attend university. In others you do have to pay, it’s generally a few thousand euros per year. In most countries you can get scholarships and not have to pay such fees or even get a salary for studying.
I believe we’re just misunderstanding each other. I do agree, for many jobs a degree is not necessary. But for many other jobs it is, or at least some kind of technical training. I believe the amount of jobs who do require some kind of certificate, at least in Europe, is higher than 1%. An electrician will be required a certificate to handle home installations and to ensure he knows what the normative is. A lathe operator will require a certificate which ensures he will not harm himself. A nurse now requires a degree, it used to be just a specific formation. Many other jobs are available who do not require a degree.
I’m not really sure to what you refer to as privatisation of job opportunities.
Nah, but you can do that in America.
There’s literally an entire demographic of americans that are having trouble with getting a job because they don’t have certification and it’s a nationwide problem causing insane amounts of debt for the general population, so unless there’s some kind of joke about the american healthcare system in there, then I don’t get what you’re saying.
I’m just saying there’s been a lot of people pretending to be doctors throughout America’s history.
Got it.
Only when you are talking about earning money. The smartest people out there are the ditch diggers and factory folk.
And what exactly would those two very specific demographics qualify as being smart?
I’m generalizing. There are more than two “very specific demographics”. More than two. Let’s call them proletariats for lack of a better word. The pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake is what I was referring to. The “going to college and getting a good job” days are mostly over, unless you have an “in”.
Hmm, while I agree that no person is more intelligent than another just because of their status and that people who do their job often know better than their manager, the reality is that wealthy people are often better educated, making them the smartest. We just, as you allude to, have a privatization of means of production, but also of education. I would say the highest collection of knowledge, and thus smartness, can currently be found with high earning white collar job. Like lawyers or doctors.
It doesn’t. It costs money to get the diploma that’s proof of your smarts. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz didn’t actually get a brain, he got a diploma.
My son is a committed cinephile, and has systematically watched nearly every movie ever made, in any country, in any era ( it seems). He’s an expert, by anyone’s estimation. He just started back to college for a degree in Film Studies, because while he has the knowledge, in order to get a job teaching film, or working in an archive, etc., he needs the degree.
So you aren’t buying the knowledge, any person who makes a serious commitment can get the knowledge, you are paying for an organization ( a school) to endorse your knowledge. Kind of a Certificate of Authenticity for your intelligence.
It doesn’t benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
also competing with the rich for high paying jobs too. thats why its gatekept. like AMA, AND MANY graduate level jobs.
It doesn’t if you know how to read. I don’t think of college as paying to learn; it’s paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won’t have a degree proving it.
This about a thousand times.
I can only guess he is asking why it is expensive to get the degrees, and that’s a fair point.
I’m old enough now to know I could be a Dr. Something with my knowledge and experience but would just have to put in massive time to get it recognized. Since I can’t gain much* with that, screw it.
*aside from social bragging rights and rl title which is about worth as much as in games (I am against titles how did you guess? - not against diplomas and certificates, mind.)
Oh and before I forget: learning - depending on field - can be done by hands on and experiencing or simply pondering yourself, that’s free too. Too few people do that and only rely on preprocessed knowledge.
Valve made me stop giving a shit about college when someone (I cant remember if it was Vince or Gabe) said they are much more likely to hire someone who has self taught themselves and made something to show for it than a college grad with nothing to show but a degree.
I really wanna work there 😮💨
*in the US. In Germany a semester at my university costs about 300 Euros and that includes cheaper lunch and a ticket to use all public transport in the whole of Germany.
You’re proud of giving students free ICE tickets? What is wrong with you???
What?
I guess the joke is that in Germany the high speed train is called “ICE” (named that way way before the US department)
ICE =“inter city express”, its the German high speed rail and in fact private transportation. But you can use the regional rail network in all of Germany for free. Non students pay 58€ per month for that privilege.
I know, this was just a poorly worded joke about ICE in the US
Is this a bot? It makes no sense
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it’s a fucking valuable activity.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We’ve had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire “help” session you provide.
We’ve had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don’t work. OK let’s see your system and go through the steps. Let’s check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn’t do step one, because it said I didn’t have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro… why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you’ll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
I’ve been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.
Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school’s attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You’re de facto assumed smart if you’re in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.
Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers.
I’ve taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don’t really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)
When people say that higher grades don’t make you successful, many don’t realize that that probably means students who sacrificed their performance on school assessments to challenge themselves, work on personal projects and gain experience rather than trying to get a perfect assessment score in school. A portfolio is more important than grades when it comes to applying for jobs.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn’t be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn’t do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don’t have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
I’m not talking just about “heavily needed jobs.” I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they’re being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It’ll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the “job qualification” part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
A quality education teaches how yo learn which applies to absolutely every single job that exists. Yes, even the simple ones like basic labor.
