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A comment on The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone (2018). Parent comment

Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon... by Clamchop on Friday July 07, 2023 @03:14PM (#36636928)
The aforementioned less-useful degrees open a lot more doors than that, particularly administrative and managerial, plus opportunities to make a lateral move into a graduate program or otherwise post-grad training opportunity in a subject with more practical utility.

Any college degree is valuable for getting a higher-paying career but the cost (both direct and opportunity) of going to college paired with bad luck or poor performance afterward may nevertheless make it a bad bet.

More vocational programs (even in STEM and "knowledge worker" domains) are a good idea, better than trying to use universities for that purpose, but the lack of prestige appears to be a problem and many of the current options in this space are borderline or outright scams with low-quality education run by very much for-profit entities.

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Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon... by cutler on Friday July 07, 2023 @06:05PM (#36638889)
In the UK polytechnics used to fulfill this role and they did it well as long as the sector was well funded. Once the cost accountancy rot set-in under Thatcher every higher education institution became desperate to be re-classified as a university for fear of losing custom from the new breed of students with loans to spend. As I said, once you tie education to the job market the ideal is lost and there is no place in the world for Literature, Philosophy, Sociology, History etc.
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