Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon...
by cutler on Friday July 07, 2023 @07:52PM
(#36639798)
The UK's population has only increased 20% since 1980. As for "a bunch of people who will never pay off" you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise. I know it can be hard to get out of this mindset but once upon a time there really was a culture of education for its own sake.
Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon...
by NoMoreNicksLeft on Saturday July 08, 2023 @03:25AM
(#36642166)
> you're back to education as a cost/benefit exercise.
In the real world that I live in, everything costs something. Only those who are insulated from the cost of things get to gibber absurdities like "this is more important than what it costs!".
Higher education isn't marginal. This isn't couch-cushion money. It either has to have a payoff, or it has to go away. It is imperative... making different choices won't prevent it going away, all you can affect is how much melodrama is stirred up when it does disappear.
It is a cost/benefit exercise. It always has been. If the pro-higher-education crowd wants to pretend otherwise, then not only are they deluded but their political influence is disastrous and we need to find a way to blunt it.
Not only can we not afford it (the cost has gone up at some absurdly fast rate that makes inflation look cuddly), but the very trends in higher education that cause the cost to spiral out of control are themselves on an upwards trajectory.
You're not doing anyone any favors peddling this nonsense. The later starts to adult life affect people negatively. The student debt is more than any ordinary burden, it is a boat anchor chained to everyone's neck. And it doesn't even guarantee most of these people a career. None of them sit in their cardboard box underneath the overpass in between their 5 part-time jobs thinking "gee, I can't file bankruptcy for my $170,000 in student debt, but at least I got a B+ in my undergrad philsophy class, that's what's really important".
> Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees,
When its population was what fraction of its current population? When it was fully-funded for those who could make the cut, and all the other chavs were tossed out to try to make some sort of life in the working class? And don't think I'm picking on the UK here, it's the same all over.
> regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market
When 5% of the population gets a university degree, that's a useful filter to decide who you want managing the other 95%. When 45% (or 75%, or 100% like you like to daydream about) have a university degree, it's not useful at all. You can no longer determine who should be in the managerial class by who has a degree and who doesn't. You need to use a different metric.
And they do. They use different metrics now. And oh, that managerial class thing... that's about the only one still around. Not much left in the way of working class jobs.
> A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline.
If it's an investment, why would you waste that on a bunch of people who will never pay off?