As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would question this assertion
With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it's not clear if it has really worked out. In 1970, approximately 10% of the US population had a bachelors degree or higher. In 2017, that number is closer to 30%, yet incomes have remained stagnant throughout that entire period and job quality has declined. Not what you'd expect from the promised higher incomes and better jobs that people were willing to spend large amounts of money for.
If I was no troll, I would admit a soft tooth for Finland focus on early education and the amazing results they have doing so.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-sc...
I've also grown up in a region where education was overlooked, and living with complete fucking morons is not fun. Especially when these morons themselves think that education is worthless, which is a snowball effect meaning many of their children will be stupid, as well.
On the other hand, it's easier to control them if you want to. Like they did in Medieval ages and earlier. Yeah, let's go back to that.
The ROI is as indirect and long term as it gets, but it's real and it's massive.
Having an educational system is a sign that the society is wealthy and can afford it, but doesn't mean it's the best use of resources involved (thus it might have a bad ROI).
You said education was overlooked where you come from, was there an educational system there ?
For one, if the labor market in a particular specialty becomes oversaturated, does that mean existing grads need to spend years retraining?
High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always.
However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.
Speaking of illiteracy, there's an urban legend (not sure if true, anyone with access to data please check it) that literacy rate has actually dropped in the US throughout the 20th century, coinciding with increase of education "supply".
Everything from 1% to 66% illiteracy has been attempted to sell to people.
It does seem that illiteracy clusters with various citizenship status, racial and other demographics, simple age distribution of a geographic location, and socioeconomic level to an extent that if you successfully filter those effects out you end up with a boring flat line at 100% literacy when ends up meaning nothing. The largest factor is literacy graphs and maps are basically a restatement of immigration data.
From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes the school almost irreplaceable.
In other areas, like programming, you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn, as long as you have enough self discipline to keep yourself on track. There are tons of resources you can learn from and you can practice as much as you want. I did it and it has been working well so far.
Overall, I wouldn't say we should ditch education at all, but we should seriously rethink the way it works. We can do much better than this.
They also learn to read, write and count. It's a rather useful skillset to have :D
While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating.
Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.
There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that.
I seriously hope other universities do it differently and I just attended the wrong one.
Not to say theoretical education worth naught, I say there is a cursor that is way tilted in favour of theory that costs less and make universities earn more.
Let's call it a corporatism behaviour.
You don't want a surgeon that was good at school, you want a surgeon that when his hospital is poor will use his earning to buy medical reviews to stay up to date, say fuck to the hospital and take unpaid vacations to go in conferences to stay up to date.
You want a surgeon that don't care about his diploma, or the titles but stay focused on his craft and will go on learning without caring for what society legally requires him to do in order to practice.
The challenge the real world presents is that the resources needed to reach that level, such as access to specialized equipment, is not in reach of the average person. It's not like a software development career where a widely available personal computer that can be purchased for hundreds – even tens – of dollars pretty much sums up everything you need to become among the best in the world.
What the schools have been able to provide is a place where people can pool their resources to gain shared access to infrastructure. Education comes as a natural consequence of effectively utilizing that infrastructure, of course.
Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas...
Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated.
Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for instance are a poor choice for being innovative.
"M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris."