the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt
kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting
I went to college because my parents forced me to. Thankfully I got out without any debt. I cant imagine how upset I would be if I racked up 100K is debt and ended up with a useless degree like many of my friends did.
That being said... I cant really blame my parents for forcing me to go. It did seem like the best option at the time. No one told me, or I guess them, about alternative educational programs or trade schools. I'd probably be a carpenter now if someone had. I had pretty much zero plans for my life post high school so college at least gave me something to do while I figured it out.
Between 2008 and 2015 the number grew by nearly 50%.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.45.a...
They also force each other into "worthless credentials", as many college graduates will only date other college graduates.
You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success.
The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem.
Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.
It's expensive, but nice work if you can get it
I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
The top schools in Japan are indeed quite competitive, but there are also universities that admit almost any high school graduate. A few decades ago, a lot of new universities were established just when the birthrate was starting to drop. Now some lower-tier private universities are struggling to attract enough students to survive.
[1] https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13...
Yeah this is problematic, on one hand you have people who work harder for it pass the entrance exams and get in (like in France for example where some engineering schools like Polytechnique and ENS have a super difficult entrance exam but then you know everyone studying there earned it), but on the other hand you get some people who are just lazy or not good at physics get filtered from top tier positions in CS because the entrance exam had Math and Physics equally attribute to your grade.
I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.
There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
I have a degree in physics with a minor in literature. I took one upper div lit class a quarter. I never memorized a thing. Instead I read a ton, both assigned and peer review, and wrote a ton, both essays and creative. My lit classes are far more memorable than my physics classes because I learned the skill of communicating my ideas. "Low-grade" creative writing taught me that my ideas will never be conveyed as I hoped; good criticism can be immensely helpful; and rewriting my work is when something truly useful comes together.
> There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, and not mastering new ways to think.
The biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization involved. Must be a useless field of study.
This is a straw man. Nobody said memorization is verboten.
A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars. If a med school matriculated students who never did practical and had never deliberated treatment modes and tradeoffs, et cetera, yes, it would be close to useless.
And here is your straw man. Nobody said they were worth that much. You haven't demonstrated that a significant portion of any major exhibits these traits.
Four years of a young person's time is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So beyond the direct cost of education, that is the opportunity cost, to the individual and to society. I think that's money well spent for e.g. a proper liberal arts degree. It isn't for a piece of paper pursued for its own end.
This is the basis of your entire point, and you haven't backed it up with anything of substance. You can keep tossing red herrings, but this hasn't been addressed.
I would certainly believe that person. However, saying "this major at this school has low standards" is not the same as saying "a bunch of majors at all schools have low standards and are thus worthless."
What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
I agree, and was on the edge in not including that major, but did so because there are English majors and there are undergrads who got a degree in English. At a lot of tier 2 public universities (e.g. the one I went to), the latter dominate. A student showing initiative can get a top-notch liberal arts education. But the average student won't. They'll skim, read the SparkNotes and pass through unchanged because the point isn't studying literature but getting a diploma.
Students who want to learn anything should be given the opportunity. I strongly believe that. But more people with degrees doesn't make for a better-educated population. And driving money into encouraging that doesn't necessarily advance society either.
English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.
Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
If you see the study of any humanities at all as only possibly measured by what success you gain in the domains of social status or notoriety, then I wonder if you apply that same rubric to STEM fields? Please be mindful that just because you dont know about something, doesn't make it dumb, bad, or pointless. At the very least, don't wave away so simply an entire discipline!
They can do this by reading books. There are even books of criticism that help you learn about other books.
I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay.
You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.
Free education levels the playing field. Moreover, I feel guilt. I have been a beneficiary of free education. Free transport, free college tuition, free books and some paid assistance with living somewhere else. Coming from a working class family it has given me an amazing boost in:
* Career (master computer science)
* Spiritual knowledge (one Buddhism course was enough)
* Outlook on the world
* Network
University isn't perfect, but if I wasn't given this chance then I would not be able to replicate certain pivotal experiences simply by using the internet and my own wit. In that sense, I still believe it levels the playing field by quite a bit.
School was always meant as the great equalizer and I think it still should be, as imperfect as it is.
I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc.
We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.
Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.
To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.
We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling.
How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles.
The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore
Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states.
My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)
There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of education, such as vocational or work experience. One is not better than the other. I'm weary of people that think they're smarter or better than someone else on the basis of what school they went to or how long for. Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Particularly in the information age, but even well before the age we find ourselves in, there's always been value in the pragmatic experience of less intellectual pursuits.
I'd say the U.S.'s slant towards pragmatism and away from intellectualism is one of my favorite things about the country. I'd say it showed itself pretty well on the Covid response. Red states were more quicker to re-open, quicker to drop restrictions, and quicker to move on to living with Covid and in spite of it. People knew intuitively that you wouldn't be able to control a virus more infectious than the common cold.
And many people know this, intuitively as well, that's why New York loss record population last year and why Florida and Texas grew dramatically. The intellectuals running New York and New York City probably have tons of education and not one bit of common sense, because all they know is conformity. When an ordained expert says jump, they ask how high?
That doesn't even begin to cover the other part of it, which is how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.
I can agree with you on that.
Almost all of my classes had leftist brainwashing. In my machine learning class, the professor would use voting republican as a classifier making the wrong decision. Given that people had made it this far in education to be good at repeating and learning what ever the professor says and that the professor is in a position of power over the students, this is very bad.
> There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
Well, we now have to show our papers to go to restaurants, bars, work, etc and are now required to mask our faces in public. its considered an act of terrorism to raise your voice at a school board meeting, and we're being censored on internet platforms. so yeah, you already accomplished your soviet-style authoritarianism.
America just wants new grads to be indebted to motivate them to get to work.
Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life!
Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there.
Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals.
I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?