> There's no supply / demand pricing mechanism to influence a student's major.

This is really the most important issue. People are spending tons of money on worthless degrees. If they were getting degrees worth something, we wouldn't even be having these discussions.

Why would having someone who knows the law and drives a taxi make it a waste of resources? Taxi drivers should be uneducated in your view. Why? How does that help society?

Many lawyers need to drive taxis to get by. Being a lawyer doesn't mean instant riches unless you land at a high profile firm directly out of school.

Studying law isn't a finite resource either.

"I never let schooling get in the way of my education."

The problem with your view is you assume the only way to get educated is via academia. There is a lot of education when you become a mechanic, an electrician, a factory worker, a firefighter, etc. That is not academic. You learn on the job. There are also many certification courses for these fields that run outside of traditional college system.

I believe in free schooling to teach basic, essential skills like reading, computing, math, etc. I'd even argue for a greater emphasis on financial education in K-12. But college is different.

The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose. It costs people resources in the form of taxes.

In the meantime, we live in the information age. Teaching people to teach themselves is probably the most valuable skill we can teach.

> The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose.

Education allows one to lead a richer life regardless of ones circumstance. Consider the janitor who took 8 years to get a bachelors degree in classics (after learning English). He admits that now with a degree he’ll probably try to become a janitorial supervisor.

But two things stand out, first there is no shame in a job as a janitor, and second to him the education was an end in itself, not a means to an end.

https://nypost.com/2012/05/13/what-class-columbia-university...

Since we're on anecdotes, my father was a firefighter who never got a degree at all. Never went into debt. Worked his way up to become Battalion Chief. It's cool the janitor had a passion for classics and wanted to learn about literature. As long as he did that with no expectation that there would be a writing job for him on the other end of that, all's fair in my mind. The guy worked for Columbia, so he probably got free classes as an employee. That being said, these anecdotes aren't sufficient to capture the broad trend which is students going to school to get a degree because they're told that's the thing to do. And for a significant portion of the population, the myth of a degree leading to automatic prosperity persists.

Higher education was never designed for getting a job. Rich families sent kids to be educated. Lately it is a degree factory. But it doesn't mean your father should have been barred if that is how he choose to spend it.

> If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession

The problem with your view is that it makes the assumption this was, and always has been, the purpose of college. That wasn’t the historical purpose, in particular before the Morrill Act during the Industrial Revolution

> There is a lot of education when you become a mechanic, an electrician, a factory worker, a firefighter, etc. That is not academic. You learn on the job.

This is true for every profession. Is there any job where you pop out of school ready to perform like an expert? Lawyers, doctors, scientists, etc. — all these folks learn to do their jobs on the job, despite their years or decades of training in academia.

> The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose.

There is more to life, and to work, than preparing for a profession by learning profession-specific skills.

> Many lawyers need to drive taxis to get by. Being a lawyer doesn't mean instant riches unless you land at a high profile firm directly out of school.

Wait, what? Since when?

I’ve heard of the actor waiting tables, I’ve never heard of the taxi-driving lawyer.

In Cuba, it's quite common.

Taxi drivers with literature degrees make more interesting conversation :)

Can confirm :)

Was once driven by a chap who had a very in depth knowledge of Turkish literature; I spent a good 25min listening to him talk about Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, two writers I had recently read (and liked). Turns out the guy had been a lit professor at tertiary level back in Turkey. And here he was, driving a taxi on a rainy evening in a godforsaken town in the Midlands (UK).