Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I'll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; "a rising tide lifts all boats" society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
Free at point of service. But it's 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what's the point of public coffers if they aren't being spent on public good?
I got beat for refusing to work in a mall hanging clothing while the "school" took my pay for my education at sped ed. Sweden should think about running things here instead..
Learning isn't a guarantee of a higher income. It might help temporarily, but when all the poor are educated they will still be on the bottom of the economic pyramid, and possibly less complacent about their situation having been educated...
Above I provided some research into this debate. It didn't have any information on people "obviously not educating themselves". Would you be able to cite some research?
You are ignoring the systemic effects: a society were everybody is highly educated is a society were everybody can worked in higher value added areas hence the entire society is actually richer.
Even those who are poor in a highly educated society relatively to others in the same society are still better off compared to people in societies which do not invest in Education - even when that society focuses more on quality of life than wealth production, they live much better because of that society's higher productive capabilities.
The biggest difference between the US and most of Europe when it comes to Education is that the former looks at it as a way for individuals to become more competitive in the job market versus other individuals (a perspective also displayed in your posts) whilst the latter sees Education as a strategic investment to raise the productivity of the entire country, often beyond the mere "money making" and into quality of life domains.
Sweden invests in Education because it allows the country to more and better host higher return Economic areas this pulling the country up, whilst in the US beyond a certain point it has to be individuals investing themselves in their own Education purely for their own personal good.
I think Sweden has actually become more like America in that regard. Young people are not thinking about the country, they want to get rich quick, just like in America.
The culture in Sweden is also highly americanized, if thats a word for it... American tv, American social media, American attitudes.
Everyone realizes that going to work for a corporation as a salary slave is not the way to get rich. Its the same thing in the US with the gen z generation as we have here.
Sweden is like mini America but with enough socialism that companies cant do what they want, and people have access to laws to protect their jobs to a degree, as well as free healthcare, parental leaves and vacations.
Also public transport. But America is better for those super high salaries. They hardly exist here.
I've lived in 3 countries in Europe for long periods in the last 3 decades and at least in the last two - Britain and Portugal - also saw the "Americanization" of society.
This was especially glaring in Portugal as there I was returning from 2 decades abroad, which made more visible the changes to an American model that happened in the meanwhile, including in terms of how people's behaviour has shifted more towards that way of thinking, very similarly to what you're describing for Sweden.
Even the politics has shifted to American style sleaze talk and even lying - back in the day politicians would resign when caught lying, nowadays that's just Monday morning.
Personally I find it even more shocking for Portugal since IMHO, Portugal was always culturally more backwards than Northern Europe (specifically in comparison with The Netherlands, were I also lived and hence can compare both countries from personal experience) and American ways are (also IMHO) even more regressive than Portugal in general (at least when it comes to interpersonal relations, where the American way glorifies sociopathic behaviours whilst traditionally the Portuguese way was a lot about taking in account the feelings of others, though also with a big chunk of "what will people think" that moderates acts of screwing up other people directly), though it's a different kind of regressiveness, and the Americanization of Portugal coincides with what by most metrics (such as PP income, inequality, social mobility, quality of life, violent crime) is the country stopping it's progress (that had been going one since Fascism was overthrown in 74) and now going back.
Again, comparing like to like with The Netherlands (which has gone down a route similar to what you describe for Sweden), I think how bad Americanization was for the various countries in Europe very much depends on how advanced they were in terms of both the wealth of their society and popularity of politicies to benefit the many as a group, hence countries like Portugal have so far suffered more than The Netherlands (and, it seems, Sweden) purelly because of having started this period already well behind those countries.
Education is a good thing, but in a society where everybody is well educated just having an education doesn't get you the most desirable real estate...
I am a mod here and this comment was reported for Nazi rhetoric.
While I'm certainly sorry to see anti-immigration sentiment I would rather show a realistic perspective of immigration. It's easy to see that immigration is a positive for the host county and for the world, especially for refugees.
Thankfully Sweden seems to have a generally healthy perspective on welfare and immigration.
Here is an interesting meta study on research into the Swedish immigration debate.
In the most direct measurement, the immigrant populations that take the longest time make net positive tax contribution are refugees.
The low employment rate among refugees in their first years in the host country means that average incomes were low in these years. Although incomes grew steadily as the years passed, it took almost 20 years for the average refugee in Sweden to make a positive annual net contribution to public finances. The simple explanation for this is that a larger proportion of migrants have been active in sectors that are socially necessary but low paid, in service occupations such as healthcare, transport, restaurants, and so on (Frödin & Kjellberg, Citation2018).
I hope Swedish people feel pride in the refugees they are able to host. It's impressive that despite refugees working a lot of jobs that are needed for society to function (letting other high tax payers have nice lives) but are low pay, they are still able to become net contributors to public finances in 20 years.
The paper points out how integrating immigrants into the workforce quickly is important but that can be challenging because refugees often come in influxes.
And education is a big part of finding work:
And in conclusion it says:
With this as a central point of departure, an aging population is considered by far the most important motivation for increasing immigration. From this perspective, migration can be justified both from a short-term perspective, as its net contribution to the public finances can be crucial for the financing of welfare, and from a long-term perspective, as it can have clearly positive effects on the supply of labour. This is mainly for demographic reasons as the vast majority of migrants are of young working age. Among migrant groups, two categories are clearly favourable to government finances: highly educated migrants and labour migrants. Objections are often raised to the third category – refugee immigrants – who are argued to have high introduction costs, mainly in the initial years of residence.
A one-sided focus on the average cost burden of refugee migrants that only compares their costs during the years of stay in Sweden with the costs of the native population during the same period is highly misleading. Such a comparison ignores the extensive costs to which comprehensive welfare systems are exposed. For the Swedish welfare system, with its generous benefits and welfare services, life cycle welfare expenditure includes a social safety net during childhood and adolescence. This provides a more comparable picture of migrants’ actual burden on welfare programmes in relation to citizens covered by social protection from ‘the cradle to the grave’. The significant number of refugees who migrate as adults imposes no costs at all on the public finances of the host country during these years. Thus, if their costs to the welfare system are related to their age, the average total cost burden on the welfare system will be significantly lower than that of the native population.
In sum, and as Scocco and Andersson (Citation2015) and Ruist (Citation2019) note, the effects of immigration on the economy are exaggerated in the political debate. The growing opposition to immigration can be explained by the failure of the political establishment to implement the rapid inclusion of newly arrived migrants into the labour market. The literature on the impacts of migration does not find any trends that could seriously threaten the sustainability of welfare states. Modern welfare states do not experience any dramatic economic problems due to immigration. In economic terms, immigration can affect central government finances by a few percentage points, plus or minus, depending on the success of the employment policy and whether the labour market succeeds in quickly absorbing new migrants, but can by no means be considered a threat to financial stability.
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it's a fucking valuable activity.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was "A 'C' gets a degree". And while "haha that's funny" there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We've had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire "help" session you provide.
We've had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don't work. OK let's see your system and go through the steps. Let's check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn't do step one, because it said I didn't have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro... why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you'll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
I've been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.
Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school's attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an "A" in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You're de facto assumed smart if you're in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.
Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers.
I've taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don't really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)
When people say that higher grades don't make you successful, many don't realize that that probably means students who sacrificed their performance on school assessments to challenge themselves, work on personal projects and gain experience rather than trying to get a perfect assessment score in school. A portfolio is more important than grades when it comes to applying for jobs.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn't be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn't do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don't have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
I'm not talking just about "heavily needed jobs." I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they're being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It'll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the "job qualification" part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they're racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn't a white christian republican.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90's. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn't have to pay a dollar >:(
For what its worth, you can sit in on most if not all lectures, without paying. Tutorials, exams and the fancy robe and paper cost, but to sit and listen to the lectures is free at all unis. Some caveats apply regarding crowding, but generally you can acquire knowledge for free.
So that's why the USA is the primary source of monetised knowledge. Fwiw I fully support pirating educational media, because if many countries of the world can access a significant amount of education for free, everyone should have the same chance, regardless of how the government of the locale wants to rule and restrict it.
I support fair wages for those who deliver publicly available services at material cost only or lower, so I support taxation that finances it and minimum wage regulation. Even though I believe the current minimum wage in the West isn't sufficiently regulated. It needs to triple in order to catch up to the 'inflation', or the perceived monetary value of everything.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you're wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don't actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn't sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can't.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
I would also add that damn near all of human information is free to be had on the internet for the low, low price of a monthly broadband bill. The real expense comes when you want a piece of paper that says you know all this that other people will take seriously.
While absolutely true. I would say it's much harder to find today than ten years ago. The Internet as an information source is being degraded on a daily basis. The amount of misinformation, ads disguised as information, and AI slop is destroying your ability to find that information.
Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free.
You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.
It's true for infotaiment stuff but for boring knowladge not so much. If you seek textbooks and recordings of lectures, there is still a lot of great stuff out there. It's boring as ditch water but boring is good.
Disclaimer: I 100% support "free" healthcare and "free" education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We've not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as "free" is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it's something we all have to collectively fund.
By calling for education and healthcare to be free, you're voluntarily giving ammunition to politicians that they can use to sway low-information voters.
If every person who supported public education and public healthcare stopped calling it free right now, the people against these public services would still call them free. Because they want it to sound like people are trying to get something for nothing. They like it when we call it free.
Calling something free just conforms to the narrative that education and healthcare are something you would have to pay for in the first place. Why would you ever have to pay for a basic human right?
Idno man, that's sounds like a very America brained argument. When people say free healthcare they don't mean we should have self sustaining health slaves colony to heal us up for no money. Obviously it's going to cost tax money if it's not directly billing the consumer.
Public healthcare also doesn't mean free healthcare. In Iceland it's subsidised 90% with a wax payment of like $200 monthly or something so it's not free, but it is public. You can also have free but private
It doesn't if you know how to read. I don't think of college as paying to learn; it's paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won't have a degree proving it.
I can only guess he is asking why it is expensive to get the degrees, and that's a fair point.
I'm old enough now to know I could be a Dr. Something with my knowledge and experience but would just have to put in massive time to get it recognized. Since I can't gain much* with that, screw it.
*aside from social bragging rights and rl title which is about worth as much as in games (I am against titles how did you guess? - not against diplomas and certificates, mind.)
Oh and before I forget: learning - depending on field - can be done by hands on and experiencing or simply pondering yourself, that's free too. Too few people do that and only rely on preprocessed knowledge.
Valve made me stop giving a shit about college when someone (I cant remember if it was Vince or Gabe) said they are much more likely to hire someone who has self taught themselves and made something to show for it than a college grad with nothing to show but a degree.
It's still free. You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.
I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
Sure. Depends on what exactly. A teacher should have a formal education, backed by a paper while say a tradesperson should have informal hands-on training. (just saying for an employment hiring stand point)
I guess what I'm saying is: if you think that learning is strictly at the institution level, you are missing out on things that aren't taught.
I don't disagree at all, Information has always been out there for those who seek it out, the problem lies within capitalism, which only values education that has been paid for.
Often jobs will require a degree and experience, even trades that you say require informal training often require some sort of red seal or at least have an apprenticeship program.
You can get that education however you like, but its a bit more difficult to find an employer in a labour flooded market that is willing to let you prove your knowledge if you don't have the recognition to back it up.
The education isn't any less fruitful, but it is just valued less by the ruling class simply because it didn't require money.
Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation.. often employers don't give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.
Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it's own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.
A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.
No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.
Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they're still paying off the loans. And they are.
that is true, , but its harder to fake something like biotech experience than programming, or coding, because you can simply catch up on your free time. some people are afraid lying. i followed a person from a university that was in my class on Linkedin before they enshittified the site. every semester he was adding 1+years of experience for every semester he was still in the school,. he was definitely bullshitting his resume to a job.
You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.
Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a "field house" built in the 40's and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.
60+ years later, it's all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias "dining halls" now.. and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.
Thing is, it's been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.
The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.
This is part of why I've been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen's program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they're 20.
And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it's gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.
not everyone can become a tradesperson, or want to. plus they dont want thier back/body to be broken by the time they are 30s or 40s. and its only ever available to 1-2 demographic anyways, they make the majority.
thats why women make up 60% of bio majors now, far surpassing men, and getting into grad studies, mostly being nurses, or health related jobs. or even MD, rarely BIOTECH/bio research. although its skewed this way because theres also systems in place to help women more than men.
.. they dont want thier back/body to be broken by the time they are 30s or 40s..
Tell me you don't understand the Trades, w/o telling me you don't understand the trades.
I'm 60 this year, went through menopause over 15 years ago and have no arthritis or back issues whatsoever. This isn't 1850.
In 45 years of being in the Trades, the heaviest thing I've had to lift has been 5 gallon buckets of paint.
In the Trades, one doesn't have to worry about lifing a person out of a bed either. I've known nurses that have fucked their backs doing just that.
Anyone can be in the Trades, and the risk of AI building a house is far less than it is for AI to design some new molecule.. and given that President Stephen Miller is chasing the undocumented construction labor out of the country, it's a field ripe for women to enter into and make great coin, and have almost limitless work.
This is exactly right. There are countless free classes on coursera, edx and Harvard for free. And read. Read real books, daily. A degree costs money because it’s proof of learning. In theory. It really isn’t, of course, because most US universities are diploma mills.
Institution based learning is unbelievably more effective though. Professional educators, structured courses and external reviews of ones learning are not only helpful, for higher levels of education they are vital. No amount of going to the library will make you a surgeon or an engineer or a scientist.
Not denying that. But there is more knowledge found than at a university. My arguement was that you are paying the teacher whom has first hand experience they can share to their students, not strictly education itself.
Institution based learning iscan be unbelievably more effective.
Institution based learning also creates a bunch of barriers primarily because "learning" is not the main purpose of a modern university.
Those "professional educators" are often researchers moonlighting as educators, experts on their field, but rarely in addition to education. Their metrics are also not how well is material "taught" but to achieve a standard distribution of grades which can result in some real perverse incentives.
Those "structured courses" have the same fundamental design flaw of primary education. They aren't designed primarily for learning, they're designed for factory work and obedience.
That's not touching on the more critical part of financial incentives and how financial strain, and excessive amounts of stress in general, is not conducive to a learning environment.
Source: self made electric engineer thanks to the library and the dump.
It's still free. You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
You're not actually saying anything useful here.
While it is true that the desire to acquire knowledge comes from within, you're utterly disregarding how lack of access to educators, equipment, facilities, etc., can slow down or halt individual progress.
You've also disregarded some rather serious regulatory issues; I don't go to self-taught doctors, and don't want self-taught engineers designing my bridges and airplanes.
I'm saying education doesn't always equal a degree.
Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it's the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
I'm saying education doesn't always equal a degree.Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it's the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
Tl;dr: you posted a banal platitude with a definite implication, and are now being made to walk back and diminish the scope of the intellectual turd you dropped.
Both you, and everyone else reading this understands that my summary is accurate.
We all know this to be true, as you literally invited it with your first message:
I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
It's not a hard pill to swallow. You're ignoring that not everyone learns by reading a book. Some people learn be performing actions, some learn by observing instructors. Just because the way that works for you is free doesn't mean that everyone has access to that.
Right, which is why you are paying for education. You pay for the instructor's knowledge and hands on approach. You're not paying for the information itself, rather the experience someone else is taking time to show you.
You can get books free on how to build a log cabin. Thousands of settlers built their own cabin, but they had the knowledge. If they didn't they paid for someone to teach them or build it for them. Not too much different now
Yeah okay but OP is asking why it costs money to become smarter. The answer is: it doesn't. But it does cost money to get help with getting smarter and to get a certificate that you did get smarter. And that does indeed cost more than it should in many places
I guarantee you, knowledge means something. You need the degree to get the job, but if you don't know your ass for your elbow, that entry level job is as far as you are going to go. If you want a promotion and pay raise, you need to know your shit.
In healthcare, yes. An IT guy, a plumber, an analyst, no. Legal and healthcare are the only two fields I can think of right now that a person with enough knowledge couldn't enter without a diploma.
But those two fields make up what, 1 percent?
Also, I don't need to go to europe, because I'm already there.
There are many other fields that require a degree. Engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology, etc.
In some of those fields you can find some jobs which you can do without the degree, but the vast majority do require it.
I hire people and, to be fair, most people with a degree do not qualify as valid for certain jobs. But in that case is lack of knowledge. In my case I'd rather have someone without degree but with a deep knowledge; but those are very hard to find.
Ok, first off, I don't give a shit who you are or what you do, that's not what this is about and unless your job has to do with looking at such topics in a scientific and non subjective way, which I did not read from you, your opinion matters just as much as anyone elses, just like mine.
Coming back to nicer grounds, yes, for the fields you have mentioned, that's absolutely true. Those fields are quite critical and in my opinion should be gated by a diploma. You don't just get to call yourself and architect and draft a building that collapses. Same with a chemist and accidentally poisoning the groundwater or being a scientist in general and wasting a lot of time and money, and so on. Also, please notice how I said I couldn't think of any more, just genuinely low effort, was not meaning to say there weren't.
I think that generally any job that has no immediate severe repercussions and where your employer can reasonably give you a probabtion period, you can just go ahead and do with enough knowledge. Such include (I'm only listing exotic ones, since that's what we're seemingly focusing on in this thread):
Technical writer
Salesperson
Consultant
Data Analyst
Project Manager
And in europe there is literally no gate to entry to lower level jobs like technical support or warehouse. Keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not in the position to be a lawyer or a scientist.
But even with all that considered, my point still stands: The jobs you can't do without a diploma, that's like 1% of jobs. (Likely incorrect percentage)
Aaaand on top of that, when you're in europe, you don't even really have to go to uni. Sure, there are lectures you need to technically be present for, but you can just go, say you're there, then leave. Then you have to pay like in the lower end of a few thousand bucks, which the university will even just straight up give to you if you're poor and you can just take your exams. I don't see nothing wrong with the exams, they're good in any way.
What's the problem here is the privatization of job opportunities, which for all intents and purposes doesn't exist on this side of the lake. This is a uniquely american problem we're talking about here.
The discussion was about the importance of a degree into finding a job. I hire people to work in research to develop novel drugs. I generally do not care whether they have a degree or not, but the degree does generally come with a level of preparation on the subject and a level of reasoning skills which are not easy to develop without formal training/working in the field. I did some times favor people without a degree over people with a PhD because they felt better candidates to me. Sometimes this is not possible due to bureaucracy. If you prefer, I do not actually hire people; I select people that should be hired with grant money I obtained to conduct certain research jobs.
I don't know how it works in the US, but to get a job in sales or as a project manager a degree is not required where I live. Candidates with a degree may be favoured by a company, but there is no law enforcing the requirement for a degree. And I do know many people working those jobs without a degree.
Regarding the fact that you don't need to go to university in Europe. I'm not really sure if I understand, I guess you mean it is not compulsory to attend lectures. I studied in Italy, there this was the case: all lectures were absolutely discretionary and you could finish your degree without attending a single one. That is except experimental stuff, which indeed you'd need to attend. You could theoretically just study from the books and pass all the exams and get your degree. However, lectures are very good for understanding what you're studying, most people were attending all lectures anyway. The fact that those are optional is useful if some days you can not attend for whatever reason, whether you're working or busy in some other way.
This, however, is not the case throughout Europe. I live in Spain now, where attendance of lectures is compulsory. You do not get a degree unless you attend a specified percentage of the lectures. Many other countries in Europe follow this system.
In some countries in Europe you do not pay to attend university. In others you do have to pay, it's generally a few thousand euros per year. In most countries you can get scholarships and not have to pay such fees or even get a salary for studying.
I believe we're just misunderstanding each other. I do agree, for many jobs a degree is not necessary. But for many other jobs it is, or at least some kind of technical training. I believe the amount of jobs who do require some kind of certificate, at least in Europe, is higher than 1%.
An electrician will be required a certificate to handle home installations and to ensure he knows what the normative is. A lathe operator will require a certificate which ensures he will not harm himself. A nurse now requires a degree, it used to be just a specific formation.
Many other jobs are available who do not require a degree.
I'm not really sure to what you refer to as privatisation of job opportunities.
There's literally an entire demographic of americans that are having trouble with getting a job because they don't have certification and it's a nationwide problem causing insane amounts of debt for the general population, so unless there's some kind of joke about the american healthcare system in there, then I don't get what you're saying.
I'm generalizing. There are more than two "very specific demographics". More than two. Let's call them proletariats for lack of a better word. The pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake is what I was referring to. The "going to college and getting a good job" days are mostly over, unless you have an "in".
Hmm, while I agree that no person is more intelligent than another just because of their status and that people who do their job often know better than their manager, the reality is that wealthy people are often better educated, making them the smartest. We just, as you allude to, have a privatization of means of production, but also of education. I would say the highest collection of knowledge, and thus smartness, can currently be found with high earning white collar job. Like lawyers or doctors.
I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.
Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.
Or in some cases, like FOSS, the knowledge is freely available, but you pay for a detailed course or tutorial to receive that information in a simpler, more streamlined way.
It costs money to get a piece of paper that proves you got smarter.
You can go to any public library and get access to nearly published material to learn from for free.
All you're missing now is academia. So go bum around a public university library and ask some college student if they canl check something out for you. Admittedly there's a money piece here, there's way around it, not all of them legal, but that'd be your easiest path.
It is wild to me that tuition is SO expensive and quality educational content is SO ubiquitous now. It does take a lot of time, skill, and effort to provide quality educational experiences, but man is it weird that it is simultaneously free and ridiculously overpriced.
University is overpriced, but a degree isn't just saying that you've gained knowledge. Being able to look up and memorize stuff doesn't mean you'll be good employee. if you can't work effectively with a team or tend not to finish a project all the knowledge in the world means nothing.
The most important thing most degrees demonstrate is that you can work for years on a project with multiple milestones involving multiple disciplines, work with others or self-direct, and meet goals.
Yes, agreed. Definitely value there. I feel like a huge part of university is demonstrating the ability to learn and apply oneself. So many people have success (like myself) in areas that they did not major in.
One thing that I think is actually an argument for big state schools vs private, more expensive lib arts schools is that the big state schools provide you skills in navigating "a System" and that does help when you get into the real world and the damn corporate rat race. Smaller liberal art schools might have more academic competition maybe, but less bureaucratic competition, in many cases. In many cases bureaucratic navigation skills, which are often more valuable in job applicants IRL.
Most impressive are folks that have gathered both the book smarts and the world navigation smarts without the need of higher education institutions and carved their path without going into huge debt or getting carried by rich parents who paid for their degree.
we had a bunch of gifted students in HS, or high performing, i believe we only had 1 gifted per semester/class. they were "paraded around" the school like they were best of the school, while at the same time neglecting the underperfoming struggling students, which is quite a large part of the student body.
alot of people fall into the trap of easy degree, like psychology, a studies/arts degree. yea you arnt going anywhere with a psych degree, if your not academically preparing for grad school like PSY-D, or psychology doctorate. i witnessed quite a few people that got a degree, and then complain about it. i had a cousin that did her psych degree properly, she has a PSY-D a while a go.
there is a suggestion going around in other forums,communities, that schools should start holding talks or seminars about different majors, and thier job prospects, but we know they wouldnt, because it would scare people away from these degrees that are money makers and coporations can abuse/exploit low wages for many fields.
our state schools in the wests, apparently were suffering from enrollment deficiencies so they decided to raise tuition (equivalent to dorms), covid exposed unmasked the problem with the schools thats been ongoing before the pandemic. basically people were graduating in the early-mid or late pandemic and they dint learn anything or dint have a chance to get any experience, so they all but criticized the schools, and probably warned thier family hs students away from university.
as of recently the state universities started to enticing hs students of early easier admissions, if they complete these x amount of courses. I dint follow up if the tuition is higher for these students as well. Some students criticized these state school, transferred to a more prestigious university for better opportunities. what universities need to do for stem is increasing the resources for LAB WORK, like make opportunities for more lap spaces,,etc, this is the most important part of a major.
*in the US. In Germany a semester at my university costs about 300 Euros and that includes cheaper lunch and a ticket to use all public transport in the whole of Germany.
ICE ="inter city express", its the German high speed rail and in fact private transportation. But you can use the regional rail network in all of Germany for free. Non students pay 58€ per month for that privilege.
It is not about getting smarter. It is about transferring knowledge. For that, the teaching person must a) have the knowledge, and b) the skills to actually transfer it. Both do not come easy and cheap.
You simply pay a professional person money for professional work. And sometimes it is really, really worth it. I learned one programming language in an expensive three day course - from the person who wrote the actual tools. This was intense. The amount of knowledge and insight gained was marvelous. And well worth the money.
In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.
same in US, most of them seek out international rich students, and you can see how much of these from the middle east and asian coming in with thier expensive cars to campus everyday. at the same time they neglect the rest of the students, so they dont prepare them for thier career track as there is very little resources directing to the departments, just enough to get by so the Professors and staff dont "revolt", they also abuse the adjunct positions to avoid paying them full time, or more benefits, if they can replace all the instructors with masters or BS level educations they would instead of getting PHDs. it all goes to wooeing international students, and sports. stem needs lab work as experience, but its so limited and small most graduating dont even know about it, or its extremely hard to get into. you can tell the university is being cheap if they use overworked professors to do advising.
Many libraries and community centers offer free classes depending on the subject. Local clubs can offer classes. Lots of youtube classes are free, like Khan Academy.
What you’re paying for is the degree on top of the education. A checkmark in a box that employers use to weed out people that don’t play the game of jumping through the hoops.
Access to books is not the same as access to a structured course with experts explaining the topics.
YouTube classes can be very good to learn something specific, but do not achieve the organization of a university program.
In my country, university classes are public a d anyone can attend for free. You pay for the degree only. If it is formation you want, you can attend classes.
Honestly, there isn't hardly anything you couldn't learn on your own. But what higher education provides is structure. It can be very difficult to actually follow through with the education if you do not have scheduled classes, exams you have to study for, deadlines for projects/exams, etc
This may not be a popular opinion but I personally reject the belief that universities have a monopoly on education. In fact I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
That said libraries are free, piracy is free, YouTube hosts millions of lectures by experts in their field and can be downloaded to watch or listen offline. I personally have spent the past couple years learning about the affects of US imperialism and haven’t spent a cent on it
free education on your own time only works to a point, when it starts needing a structured more advanced understanding of the subject. thats exclusive to universities, such as thing that requires wet lab work, essay writing,,,etc and also mathematics.
coding and computer programming you can do on your own, but an engineer , you would need hands on training.
Self teaching isn't a replacement for structured education. Making children pay money for school because the library is free would see literacy rates drop and is a brain dead take.
In my country at least public education is free. Higher education is paid for, I don’t think it’s a radical belief that learning takes place outside of university
Ok, well that’s certainly not how you phrased it in the original question man. You kept it pretty vague and relatively open to interpretation. Might have been worth narrowing the scope a bit
formal education feels like it was fully co-opted by "the market"
If you want to join "the market" (have a job and get paid for it), you need formal education
To get formal education, you need money
To get money, you need to join "the market" or have someone who's "in" to pay for you
As for "getting smarter", that's different from formal education
Brazil's top universities, the ones everybody wants to join, publish research and look good on your resume, are the public universities. They're entirely free, and if you can prove you don't have sufficient income, most will also provide somewhere to live (shared, but still) and free meals.
In other words, high quality education doesn't need to depend on your income. Protest against that, vote against that.
Technically true, but as many students find out, having classes' times all over the place each semester means you'll have a hard time finding any jobs in the meantime, which will more or less force them to live off savings or family help, especially if the course has mandatory books that you cannot find a pirate copy somewhere. Also, the student residences get full super quick. Not to mention that every public medicine course in the public unis only has like 2-3 students that actually came from the lower classes.
There are all sorts of classes available at top schools via opencourseware. You can take the highest tier courses that the US has to offer, and become educated. While not degree offering, it still would look great on a CV, if you can somehow prove you did the work.
Free books. A few years ago, I read a free electrical engineering book available on the internet, which I found fascinating. It has been a little helpful in practice as well, but I think it’s just cool to know how capacitors and motors work. Public libraries exist for a reason. Gutenberg is another option.
Many 2 year community colleges are now free tuition if you reside in the state.
And of course, there are still ways to get a degree cheap, if the paper is important to you. I finally landed at WGU 15 years ago and it was very reasonable, and has paid dividends on my original investment.
Formal education isn't for education but for the formal paper. There is so much information on the web, just learn from that. Also, libraries often times have material other than physical books
Formal education can be good for guidance. For learning the "unknown unknowns" as a famous scholar once said. Also, in terms of career, networking is the most important thing. The world is built on nepotism, unfortunately.
Hello, if you would please refer to "Wage labour and capital":
We have just seen how the fluctuation of supply and demand always bring the price of a commodity back to its cost of production. The actual price of a commodity, indeed, stands always above or below the cost of production; but the rise and fall reciprocally balance each other, so that, within a certain period of time, if the ebbs and flows of the industry are reckoned up together, the commodities will be exchanged for one another in accordance with their cost of production. Their price is thus determined by their cost of production.
...
What, then, is the cost of production of labour-power?
It is the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer.
...
Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.
The price of education can only fall once the supply of laborer requiring said education falls below the demand of such laborers and, consequently, the price of their labor power rises above the cost of creating this labor power. The (even more) bad news is:
But the productive forces of labour is increased above all by a greater division of labour and by a more general introduction and constant improvement of machinery. The larger the army of workers among whom the labour is subdivided, the more gigantic the scale upon which machinery is introduced, the more in proportion does the cost of production decrease, the more fruitful is the labour.
...
Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production.
Essentially, because it takes labor to create educational material. Unless you own slaves labor isn't free. And in fact with the modern library and Internet access I'd argue self educating is more accessible than ever in history.
You can't learn as efficiently outside of learning institutions than within them. Additionally, certain levels of education require a structured environment. No amount of self education will turn you into a surgeon, engineer or scientist. These are professions built on decades to centuries of accumulated knowledge and require continuous external review from teachers to be learned.
The only cost to an education or learning about subjects, ideas and people these days is the cost in TIME, NUTRITION AND EFFORT
Sure you can spend tens of thousands of dollars and go to university, college or whatever institution for a whole bunch of years and learn a bunch of stuff. Or you can just take the time to read a bunch of books, study them, learn from them on your own time.
I never had the opportunity to attend post secondary school ... I read, I write on my own and do things on my own. I'm not the smartest person but I've surprised my more educated friends and family in my ability to know a lot about many things. I've also traveled the world to many countries and in each country I visited, I took the time to read about it's history, read books from there and learn as much as I could about it all. I also enjoy learning about the latest technologies, so I've learned to tear apart computers, put them back together, install, uninstall, reinstall an OS and just generally play around with computer systems often. I have friends who are teachers and nurses with qualification in many things and lots of education, yet they come to me to fix their computers and they're surprised when I can talk to them about most subjects about history, politics, travel, countries, science, technology and many other things.
I hate to say it because it sounds stupid ... but having an education these days often doesn't amount to much. Unless you have a well defined goal as to what you want to do and you have a lot money, resources and support, you get to become a well rounded, educated, knowledgeable and capable individual. Otherwise, the majority of post secondary educated people I've seen are just people collected certifications and diplomas to add to a collection and don't really gain much of an education in anything valuable.
Read, read books, read all kinds of things and read often ... it's probably the biggest thing they get people to do in higher education. There is so much content out there that is freely available. Read, watch and listen to lectures that are freely available in all sorts of sites and made by actual highly educated and knowledgeable professors and professionals. Find those free resources that are vetted, recommended by people you trust.
The other part of the equation I honestly believe is nutrition. Eat properly and eat enough of the right things. My mom literally raised us on oatmeal every morning. I grew up with kids who ate sugar pops or nothing at all and the majority of them didn't end up with a good life path. Then we seldom had processed foods as mom and dad were hunters and trappers that fed us a steady diet of wild meat and especially fresh fish. We're Indigenous so a lot of our diet was from the land ... we were poor and didn't get to eat much but the food we ate was highly natural and nutritious. Eat enough good natural food, enough protein and fats, exercise, walk and train if you are young and capable and all that nutrition and blood pumping will get you to learn more, faster and retain things longer. The younger you do all this, the better it is because the older you become, the harder it is to do anything.
That's great and all but individual learning isn't a replacement for societal structures that foster and encourage education. Society wide the argument of "just read books lmao" doesn't increase the education level of a population. These things are achieved by coordinated efforts and institutional education.
It doesn't. It costs money to get the diploma that's proof of your smarts. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz didn't actually get a brain, he got a diploma.
My son is a committed cinephile, and has systematically watched nearly every movie ever made, in any country, in any era ( it seems). He's an expert, by anyone's estimation. He just started back to college for a degree in Film Studies, because while he has the knowledge, in order to get a job teaching film, or working in an archive, etc., he needs the degree.
So you aren't buying the knowledge, any person who makes a serious commitment can get the knowledge, you are paying for an organization ( a school) to endorse your knowledge. Kind of a Certificate of Authenticity for your intelligence.
Honestly you can't even buy an education outside of some technical fields needed in the economy. The only way to really become educated is to be a life long enjoyer of knowledge across many domains. There is almost no educated people left anymore since all of that has gone to the way side to make room for authoritarianism and orwellianism. Economics is a great example. Go to the most prestigious schools in the U.S and you will not learn even the most basic principles and facts of economics. Law is the same. You will not learn law as it actually is, but this totalitarian mindrot version of law.
It costs money to get a piece of paper from old, decrepit, incompetent assholes who once got pieces of paper from older, decrepiter, incompetenter assholes.
Take it from a man who dropped out of three colleges after a collective ten semesters: A college degree in most majors is a certificate of bullshit satthroughedness, not a mark of intelligence. Take it from a man who made a 97% on the FAA's Fundamentals of Instruction test and whose flight students have NEVER ONCE failed a test he's endorsed them for: Most of the college professors I've met couldn't teach a cat to meow. A rare few of them could teach a fish to bark. And "tenure" is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of outside of the Republican National Convention.
In the words of Samuel Clemens, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Go to the library and read. Read books, read scientific journals, don't read white papers, they're journalism-shaped marketing. And above all: Try shit.
It costs money to get a piece of paper from old, decrepit, incompetent assholes who once got pieces of paper from older, decrepiter, incompetenter assholes.
There's a motivational-poster-level quote in here somewhere.
One of my flight students had a Ph.D. in computer analysis of french literature. He would tell the story of a tenured professor who was THE world's expert in 19th century German poetry, but who was bathtub-full-of-artichokes insane. He would put on a funny hat and take his umbrella and march up and down the quad like he was commanding ze kaizer's own marching band.
It was my job to teach this man "A TOMATO FLAMES." The world has never made sense and neither should you.
because rich people dont want competition, so some fields are gatekept. like professorships, medical doctors, research scientists, probably admins that arnt acquired through nepotism. if have been a job forum alot of positions are taken by nepotism in general.
research heavily gatekpt, by placing a arbitrary amount x years of experience in job listings even at the entry level.
Also the top prestigious schools often breed elitist ass students too, they think they are entitled to certain jobs, or if they become professor, they think the way its taught should be higher than it would for that college.
some people are saying degrees are useless, they are if you are getting one without doing research on it before applying, thats on you. trades is not as easy to get in as you think, even if doesnt require it.
Higher education is a positional good. That means you're not paying to learn, you're paying to be ranked among the top X%. By definition only so many people can be in the top X%, so it's an arms race dynamic just bidding up the price of education.
That's also why Harvard doesn't create a chain of schools like the for-profits. They're not better at education. They're selling exclusivity.
It doesn't. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.
I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you'll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you're familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.
But also it depends. Learn on the job is a thing too in some industries, and in some people can do quite well for themselves here.
It also costs money to make money, if you have a lot of it you can make it work for you and make even more than someone who doesn't have it. This is why kids of rich ass parents get it so easy.
Irish and Islamic Arab scholars were widely sought during medieval era because their countries contained the last surviving copies of the entire roman classical canon and before, locked up in monasteries with monks and scribes copying them by hand, in all different languages, since the fall of Rome and the spread of the catholic and islamic religion into those areas.
In the dark ages, they were the only people with any access to information about the past, they spoke and could read and write many languages. Advanced mathematics were developed in Iraq in the 9th century, or even earlier in the vedas, and made their way to Europe in the 12th century. Fibonacci made a name for himself in Italy through these discoveries, which had a thriving intellectual culture in various regions for the larger part of the feudal era.
So no I dont think its a recent idea. The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world. The formation of an educated middle class is fairly recent, but as the middle class gets squeezed harder, look how the first thing to go is quality public education.
A sharp, curious and questioning mind is route to whatever passes for freedom in any age. Whether or not that opportunity is available to everyone is a sure indicator of a whether a society is more free, or more repressive.
That's not what is in question. The question was that everyone needs education for mobility.
Once the powerful got their special information, do you think serf #2 would get the same treatment?
"The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world."
A naive take at best. They wanted advantage and weaponry. Once they got that from one educated person, what advantage was there for anyone else to know it? If anything, it was to the advantage of the ruling class to make sure no one else knew.
A wiggler? Did you learn that on the first day at sophistry class at fallacy school? Is that a technical term or are you completely, totally, irredeemably full of your own farts
There would have been a patron behind the serf to even allow him school to begin with. So the serf using calculus is because a Duke felt he had promise.
I'd argue it doesn't, and moreover you cannot buy intelligence.
Sure, you can buy some books with some stuff in it and memorize that stuff, or pay for a class on some stuff and test well, but critical thinking skills seem to either innately exist, or not (depending on the individual in question), within us.
I've met people with pieces of paper that proclaim them to be certified smart that are dumb as rocks but were simply able to move through the system well enough to fool people, and people who have no such paper who are more intelligent than the former could ever hope to be. Shit happens.
90% of what I've learned hasn't been in a classroom, since I've been out for decades, since before the internet was a thing.
As for why formal education isn't free... Are you suggesting I stand in front of a group of people and teach a subject in which I'm an expert just because I should want to? I gotta eat too, you know, and my expertise didn't come from just standing around, but many hours of effort, including giving up social time, hanging out with family and friends, to become an expert.
Today you can learn nearly anything online or a library.
The Teaching Company has university lectures on DVD, available in your local library. I've watched a few, and learned tons. I'm talking 300-level courses from schools like Columbia and Harvard, courses that are 40 hours of lecture or more.
History, Religion, Physics, Math, Astronomy, Music, Arts, etc, etc.
Depends on the teacher and the conditions. If I can afford either a semester of lectures or a one time two hour personal tuition, I would choose the lecture.
Or you could emigrate to the EU, where higher education is free.
You're probably not getting into the EU easily without higher education, and they don't educate non-EU citizens for free. Even if you get EU citizenship you will still probably have to pay until you've been resident for X number of years.
It really doesn't because we have good public libraries. But that requires that people have a desire to seek out knowledge. It's also why Republicans want to defend libraries
worst, gatekeeping many fields, especially some stem fields. bio research, and biotech is one such thing. very difficult if your even lucky to find a lab in your school that has space for volunteering. and i noticed alot professors are extremely reluctant to share info about thier labs for volunteering, must be done before graduation. i dare say it, also its hidden from students knowledge. another development is bio major is mostly geared towards the female student demographic now all the way to grad school too. the ratio is 60%/40% in number of degrees held by woman vs men(for bio), and more of them are getting MS or higher too. right now phd is still legacy of men, but it will soon change.
I assume you mean it costs money directly to the end user. Even when there is free public schooling, it costs money - it's just that someone else is paying it. In most cases, the government is paying for it using revenue they collect from taxes, fines, and other levies.
It costs money because people expect to be paid for their labor (teachers, administrators, groundskeepers, construction workers, repair people, janitors, textbook authors and publishers, IT workers, trash haulers) and products (building materials, books, computers, lawnmowers, mops and brooms, gasoline).
Fair point to feel a little harangued by the cost of education, but the incongruity isn't quite so irrational it seems. This has always been the way of things - dues must be paid, costs must be levied to keep people in their place, this is the order of things, and has been for a very long time. The idea of a free education at any stage is a relatively new concept, historically speaking, and even then public schools' cost to its users (kids, parents who decline to send their children to prestigious private schools for financial reasons) are levied via taxation instead of fees outright. It always costs money, but the amount paid, and the personal/professional advantage gained vary widely.
Sort of broadly applied throughout history, it's a kind of way to establish and maintain the strata (see definition 3B) of society. You or your family must have the funds to send you to school, and if you can't pay to learn, you don't, and you go to work when you're deemed old enough. If you're lucky, you apprentice with family, if not you labour at any task which earns your bread, so to speak. The only real break in this system has been subsidy to ensure that less wealthy families' children can attend school to learn to read and basic math (as well as PE, science, literature, art, etc.), and people's ability to generate loans specifically tailored to post-secondary. It sucks ass, but please believe me when I say that it could be much worse.
This isn't my belief, it's the general state of affairs. The reason for its cost isn't rational in the sense that you're hoping for, they want for you to either produce the capital needed to push through the ceiling, or stay where you are. It isn't supposed to be fair, it's been purposely contrived to keep people "in their proper place".
Everything must be monetized. Education, art, healthcare, food and water, it all must be profitable or else there is no incentive for it to exist. Oh, you need it to live? Then hand over your wealth! What, you're looking for free handouts? Nah, either pay up or go die in a gutter.
If only that were true. Getting a degree is just paying to play, your resume goes into the trash without the right degree or certification, regardless of what skills you have. Having the piece of paper is no grantee you will get a job, hiring managers will find the dumbest reason to throw out applicants, because their job is to turn 100 applicants into 5 applicants so the people making the decision don't have to work to hard.
It was never about paying to get smarter. The original purpose of universities/higher education is long gone. It is now about paying to be accepted by high society and indoctrinating you. As Rockefeller said, I want a nation of workers, not thinkers.
Because billionaires have an interest in remaining billionaires, and if everyone was smart, there'd be more people tearing down the structures that consolidate wealth and maintain wealth inequality.
The same reason it costs money for food and water. God created both before man. And yet here we are, paying for things we need to survive. Because capitalism is just super.
You were complaining about paying for things needed to survive. It's nobodies problem but your own that you love in an apartment. The cost of that type of dwelling. Speaking of, you don't need to live there either and pay for a mortgage or rent. You have the option to build your own shelter in the woods. But it's pretty nice to not have to do that right?
Good lord, you expect everything to just be free? To expect you get basic needs at zero cost is a tad out of touch with reality. I get it, nothing is fair, but you are looking at this all wrong.
Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I'll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; "a rising tide lifts all boats" society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
Free at point of service. But it's 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
That link doesn't work because you can't add a %27 in a title.
Works for me on both Jerboa and the web interface. Maybe it's an issue with your client?
I'm using
Voyager(edit: Thunder. I can't believe I missed that). For some reason, it adds a 25 between the % and the 27.Also using Thunder - same issue here.
25 is hex for % so it somehow url encodes it again
My jerboa fails
yes you can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
%27 is an url encoded '
Whatever browser can't handle that has quite a serious compliance issue.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what's the point of public coffers if they aren't being spent on public good?
I'm pretty sure you're missing some sarcasm
That would be the people paying less tax....
You can't just compare GDP spendings and call it efficiency without accounting for the output.
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden? Otherwise it's comparing apples to pears.
Not that efficiency is the top priority in my book, but sure, it's not an unimportant metric by any means.
edit: ... am I being Poe's lawed here?
I guess that depends on how you value "Business School" as an education model.
I believe New Zealand does this as well?
I got beat for refusing to work in a mall hanging clothing while the "school" took my pay for my education at sped ed. Sweden should think about running things here instead..
You made negative claims about a vulnerable group of people.
People have been engaging you in good faith and you responded with sarcasm and trolling.
Let's let things cool off a little.
Learning isn't a guarantee of a higher income. It might help temporarily, but when all the poor are educated they will still be on the bottom of the economic pyramid, and possibly less complacent about their situation having been educated...
Yeah, it doesn't solve social mobility, but it certainly doesn't hurt!
Above I provided some research into this debate. It didn't have any information on people "obviously not educating themselves". Would you be able to cite some research?
You are ignoring the systemic effects: a society were everybody is highly educated is a society were everybody can worked in higher value added areas hence the entire society is actually richer.
Even those who are poor in a highly educated society relatively to others in the same society are still better off compared to people in societies which do not invest in Education - even when that society focuses more on quality of life than wealth production, they live much better because of that society's higher productive capabilities.
The biggest difference between the US and most of Europe when it comes to Education is that the former looks at it as a way for individuals to become more competitive in the job market versus other individuals (a perspective also displayed in your posts) whilst the latter sees Education as a strategic investment to raise the productivity of the entire country, often beyond the mere "money making" and into quality of life domains.
Sweden invests in Education because it allows the country to more and better host higher return Economic areas this pulling the country up, whilst in the US beyond a certain point it has to be individuals investing themselves in their own Education purely for their own personal good.
I think Sweden has actually become more like America in that regard. Young people are not thinking about the country, they want to get rich quick, just like in America.
The culture in Sweden is also highly americanized, if thats a word for it... American tv, American social media, American attitudes.
Everyone realizes that going to work for a corporation as a salary slave is not the way to get rich. Its the same thing in the US with the gen z generation as we have here.
Sweden is like mini America but with enough socialism that companies cant do what they want, and people have access to laws to protect their jobs to a degree, as well as free healthcare, parental leaves and vacations.
Also public transport. But America is better for those super high salaries. They hardly exist here.
I've lived in 3 countries in Europe for long periods in the last 3 decades and at least in the last two - Britain and Portugal - also saw the "Americanization" of society.
This was especially glaring in Portugal as there I was returning from 2 decades abroad, which made more visible the changes to an American model that happened in the meanwhile, including in terms of how people's behaviour has shifted more towards that way of thinking, very similarly to what you're describing for Sweden.
Even the politics has shifted to American style sleaze talk and even lying - back in the day politicians would resign when caught lying, nowadays that's just Monday morning.
Personally I find it even more shocking for Portugal since IMHO, Portugal was always culturally more backwards than Northern Europe (specifically in comparison with The Netherlands, were I also lived and hence can compare both countries from personal experience) and American ways are (also IMHO) even more regressive than Portugal in general (at least when it comes to interpersonal relations, where the American way glorifies sociopathic behaviours whilst traditionally the Portuguese way was a lot about taking in account the feelings of others, though also with a big chunk of "what will people think" that moderates acts of screwing up other people directly), though it's a different kind of regressiveness, and the Americanization of Portugal coincides with what by most metrics (such as PP income, inequality, social mobility, quality of life, violent crime) is the country stopping it's progress (that had been going one since Fascism was overthrown in 74) and now going back.
Again, comparing like to like with The Netherlands (which has gone down a route similar to what you describe for Sweden), I think how bad Americanization was for the various countries in Europe very much depends on how advanced they were in terms of both the wealth of their society and popularity of politicies to benefit the many as a group, hence countries like Portugal have so far suffered more than The Netherlands (and, it seems, Sweden) purelly because of having started this period already well behind those countries.
Education is a good thing, but in a society where everybody is well educated just having an education doesn't get you the most desirable real estate...
citation needed
I am a mod here and this comment was reported for Nazi rhetoric.
While I'm certainly sorry to see anti-immigration sentiment I would rather show a realistic perspective of immigration. It's easy to see that immigration is a positive for the host county and for the world, especially for refugees.
Thankfully Sweden seems to have a generally healthy perspective on welfare and immigration.
Here is an interesting meta study on research into the Swedish immigration debate.
In the most direct measurement, the immigrant populations that take the longest time make net positive tax contribution are refugees.
I hope Swedish people feel pride in the refugees they are able to host. It's impressive that despite refugees working a lot of jobs that are needed for society to function (letting other high tax payers have nice lives) but are low pay, they are still able to become net contributors to public finances in 20 years.
The paper points out how integrating immigrants into the workforce quickly is important but that can be challenging because refugees often come in influxes.
And education is a big part of finding work:
And in conclusion it says:
Yes, you could (should) have stopped there
It doesn't benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
also competing with the rich for high paying jobs too. thats why its gatekept. like AMA, AND MANY graduate level jobs.
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it's a fucking valuable activity.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was "A 'C' gets a degree". And while "haha that's funny" there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We've had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire "help" session you provide.
We've had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don't work. OK let's see your system and go through the steps. Let's check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn't do step one, because it said I didn't have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.
I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro... why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you'll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
I've been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.
Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school's attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an "A" in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You're de facto assumed smart if you're in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.
I've taken classes at a few different schools including Harvard. This is absolutely not true. You don't really have to be smart to do well at Harvard, although it helps, but you absolutely do have to bust your ass (in a way you do not at other top-tier schools as long you have some familiarity with the subject going into it.)
When people say that higher grades don't make you successful, many don't realize that that probably means students who sacrificed their performance on school assessments to challenge themselves, work on personal projects and gain experience rather than trying to get a perfect assessment score in school. A portfolio is more important than grades when it comes to applying for jobs.
Which also means there should be rigorous standards to continue; similar accountability to any other job.
You shouldn't be able to collect a hefty check and be like my college friend. He who failed out of our college 4 times because he was just there to go to bars do his own thing (which was not going to class or doing homework or really anything else).
I taught 3rd year humanities students in a communication related course who could not string words together into a coherent sentence. All their writing was education gore and I could only get through it by briefly pretending it was avant garde. We collectively let them get that far with core incompetencies. Shame.
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn't do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don't have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
I'm not talking just about "heavily needed jobs." I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they're being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It'll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the "job qualification" part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
A quality education teaches how yo learn which applies to absolutely every single job that exists. Yes, even the simple ones like basic labor.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they're racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn't a white christian republican.
There's more detail but that's the short version.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90's. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn't have to pay a dollar >:(
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
For what its worth, you can sit in on most if not all lectures, without paying. Tutorials, exams and the fancy robe and paper cost, but to sit and listen to the lectures is free at all unis. Some caveats apply regarding crowding, but generally you can acquire knowledge for free.
The boomers, goat generation of pulling the ladder up behind them!
So that's why the USA is the primary source of monetised knowledge. Fwiw I fully support pirating educational media, because if many countries of the world can access a significant amount of education for free, everyone should have the same chance, regardless of how the government of the locale wants to rule and restrict it.
I support fair wages for those who deliver publicly available services at material cost only or lower, so I support taxation that finances it and minimum wage regulation. Even though I believe the current minimum wage in the West isn't sufficiently regulated. It needs to triple in order to catch up to the 'inflation', or the perceived monetary value of everything.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you're wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don't actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/free-college-was-once-the-norm-all-over-america/
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educated-proletariat-created-the-student-debt-crisis/
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn't sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can't.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students... Anyone who wasn't a WASP with wealthy parents.
George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn't qualify for UTexas.
It doesn’t.
It takes time and effort to gain more knowledge. It has never been cheaper or more accessible to acquire knowledge than it is today.
To increase your intelligence, is another matter all together.
I would also add that damn near all of human information is free to be had on the internet for the low, low price of a monthly broadband bill. The real expense comes when you want a piece of paper that says you know all this that other people will take seriously.
While absolutely true. I would say it's much harder to find today than ten years ago. The Internet as an information source is being degraded on a daily basis. The amount of misinformation, ads disguised as information, and AI slop is destroying your ability to find that information.
Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free. You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.
It's true for infotaiment stuff but for boring knowladge not so much. If you seek textbooks and recordings of lectures, there is still a lot of great stuff out there. It's boring as ditch water but boring is good.
Disclaimer: I 100% support "free" healthcare and "free" education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We've not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as "free" is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it's something we all have to collectively fund.
Free to the user... Are you just trying to muddy this water?
Not at all.
By calling for education and healthcare to be free, you're voluntarily giving ammunition to politicians that they can use to sway low-information voters.
If every person who supported public education and public healthcare stopped calling it free right now, the people against these public services would still call them free. Because they want it to sound like people are trying to get something for nothing. They like it when we call it free.
Calling something free just conforms to the narrative that education and healthcare are something you would have to pay for in the first place. Why would you ever have to pay for a basic human right?
Idno man, that's sounds like a very America brained argument. When people say free healthcare they don't mean we should have self sustaining health slaves colony to heal us up for no money. Obviously it's going to cost tax money if it's not directly billing the consumer.
Public healthcare also doesn't mean free healthcare. In Iceland it's subsidised 90% with a wax payment of like $200 monthly or something so it's not free, but it is public. You can also have free but private
It doesn't if you know how to read. I don't think of college as paying to learn; it's paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won't have a degree proving it.
This about a thousand times.
I can only guess he is asking why it is expensive to get the degrees, and that's a fair point.
I'm old enough now to know I could be a Dr. Something with my knowledge and experience but would just have to put in massive time to get it recognized. Since I can't gain much* with that, screw it.
*aside from social bragging rights and rl title which is about worth as much as in games (I am against titles how did you guess? - not against diplomas and certificates, mind.)
Oh and before I forget: learning - depending on field - can be done by hands on and experiencing or simply pondering yourself, that's free too. Too few people do that and only rely on preprocessed knowledge.
Valve made me stop giving a shit about college when someone (I cant remember if it was Vince or Gabe) said they are much more likely to hire someone who has self taught themselves and made something to show for it than a college grad with nothing to show but a degree.
I really wanna work there 😮💨
It's still free. You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.
I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
I would argue that primarily youre paying for the recognition of your education, as in your diploma, which is often what employers look at.
Sure. Depends on what exactly. A teacher should have a formal education, backed by a paper while say a tradesperson should have informal hands-on training. (just saying for an employment hiring stand point)
I guess what I'm saying is: if you think that learning is strictly at the institution level, you are missing out on things that aren't taught.
I don't disagree at all, Information has always been out there for those who seek it out, the problem lies within capitalism, which only values education that has been paid for.
Often jobs will require a degree and experience, even trades that you say require informal training often require some sort of red seal or at least have an apprenticeship program.
You can get that education however you like, but its a bit more difficult to find an employer in a labour flooded market that is willing to let you prove your knowledge if you don't have the recognition to back it up.
The education isn't any less fruitful, but it is just valued less by the ruling class simply because it didn't require money.
You're ignoring safety.
Last thing I want is a Civil Engineer who's not been properly vetted.
We have enough facility failures even with civil engineering certs. Imagine if it was more cavalier.
That's a super good point!!
Most employers won’t actually check, just lie and say you have the degree if you’re confident you have the knowledge
Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation.. often employers don't give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.
Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it's own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.
A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.
No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.
Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they're still paying off the loans. And they are.
that is true, , but its harder to fake something like biotech experience than programming, or coding, because you can simply catch up on your free time. some people are afraid lying. i followed a person from a university that was in my class on Linkedin before they enshittified the site. every semester he was adding 1+years of experience for every semester he was still in the school,. he was definitely bullshitting his resume to a job.
Oof....not looking good for my case 😂
Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a "field house" built in the 40's and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.
60+ years later, it's all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias "dining halls" now.. and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.
Thing is, it's been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.
The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.
This is part of why I've been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen's program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they're 20.
And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it's gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.
Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980..
not everyone can become a tradesperson, or want to. plus they dont want thier back/body to be broken by the time they are 30s or 40s. and its only ever available to 1-2 demographic anyways, they make the majority.
thats why women make up 60% of bio majors now, far surpassing men, and getting into grad studies, mostly being nurses, or health related jobs. or even MD, rarely BIOTECH/bio research. although its skewed this way because theres also systems in place to help women more than men.
Tell me you don't understand the Trades, w/o telling me you don't understand the trades.
I'm 60 this year, went through menopause over 15 years ago and have no arthritis or back issues whatsoever. This isn't 1850.
In 45 years of being in the Trades, the heaviest thing I've had to lift has been 5 gallon buckets of paint.
In the Trades, one doesn't have to worry about lifing a person out of a bed either. I've known nurses that have fucked their backs doing just that.
Anyone can be in the Trades, and the risk of AI building a house is far less than it is for AI to design some new molecule.. and given that President Stephen Miller is chasing the undocumented construction labor out of the country, it's a field ripe for women to enter into and make great coin, and have almost limitless work.
Ask me how I know.
i was giving you and other benefit of the doubt explaining thier side of the story
This is exactly right. There are countless free classes on coursera, edx and Harvard for free. And read. Read real books, daily. A degree costs money because it’s proof of learning. In theory. It really isn’t, of course, because most US universities are diploma mills.
Institution based learning is unbelievably more effective though. Professional educators, structured courses and external reviews of ones learning are not only helpful, for higher levels of education they are vital. No amount of going to the library will make you a surgeon or an engineer or a scientist.
Not denying that. But there is more knowledge found than at a university. My arguement was that you are paying the teacher whom has first hand experience they can share to their students, not strictly education itself.
And you believe the burden of that payment should be placed on the young and uneducated?
Not sure where you thought I was implying that
Institution based learning also creates a bunch of barriers primarily because "learning" is not the main purpose of a modern university.
Those "professional educators" are often researchers moonlighting as educators, experts on their field, but rarely in addition to education. Their metrics are also not how well is material "taught" but to achieve a standard distribution of grades which can result in some real perverse incentives.
Those "structured courses" have the same fundamental design flaw of primary education. They aren't designed primarily for learning, they're designed for factory work and obedience.
That's not touching on the more critical part of financial incentives and how financial strain, and excessive amounts of stress in general, is not conducive to a learning environment.
Source: self made electric engineer thanks to the library and the dump.
You're not actually saying anything useful here.
While it is true that the desire to acquire knowledge comes from within, you're utterly disregarding how lack of access to educators, equipment, facilities, etc., can slow down or halt individual progress.
You've also disregarded some rather serious regulatory issues; I don't go to self-taught doctors, and don't want self-taught engineers designing my bridges and airplanes.
I'm saying education doesn't always equal a degree.
Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it's the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
Tl;dr: you posted a banal platitude with a definite implication, and are now being made to walk back and diminish the scope of the intellectual turd you dropped.
Both you, and everyone else reading this understands that my summary is accurate.
We all know this to be true, as you literally invited it with your first message:
What a fucking lame way to get your dopamine.
It's not a hard pill to swallow. You're ignoring that not everyone learns by reading a book. Some people learn be performing actions, some learn by observing instructors. Just because the way that works for you is free doesn't mean that everyone has access to that.
Right, which is why you are paying for education. You pay for the instructor's knowledge and hands on approach. You're not paying for the information itself, rather the experience someone else is taking time to show you.
You can get books free on how to build a log cabin. Thousands of settlers built their own cabin, but they had the knowledge. If they didn't they paid for someone to teach them or build it for them. Not too much different now
It doesn't.
You need to study to be smart and studying is free.
Check out this pedantic guy over here. Just to be clear, knowledge means shit, it’s the diploma that counts
Yeah okay but OP is asking why it costs money to become smarter. The answer is: it doesn't. But it does cost money to get help with getting smarter and to get a certificate that you did get smarter. And that does indeed cost more than it should in many places
I guarantee you, knowledge means something. You need the degree to get the job, but if you don't know your ass for your elbow, that entry level job is as far as you are going to go. If you want a promotion and pay raise, you need to know your shit.
... in america.
Everywhere. You can’t go to Europe and claim to be a doctor cause you read all the books for free
In healthcare, yes. An IT guy, a plumber, an analyst, no. Legal and healthcare are the only two fields I can think of right now that a person with enough knowledge couldn't enter without a diploma.
But those two fields make up what, 1 percent?
Also, I don't need to go to europe, because I'm already there.
There are many other fields that require a degree. Engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology, etc. In some of those fields you can find some jobs which you can do without the degree, but the vast majority do require it.
I hire people and, to be fair, most people with a degree do not qualify as valid for certain jobs. But in that case is lack of knowledge. In my case I'd rather have someone without degree but with a deep knowledge; but those are very hard to find.
Ok, first off, I don't give a shit who you are or what you do, that's not what this is about and unless your job has to do with looking at such topics in a scientific and non subjective way, which I did not read from you, your opinion matters just as much as anyone elses, just like mine.
Coming back to nicer grounds, yes, for the fields you have mentioned, that's absolutely true. Those fields are quite critical and in my opinion should be gated by a diploma. You don't just get to call yourself and architect and draft a building that collapses. Same with a chemist and accidentally poisoning the groundwater or being a scientist in general and wasting a lot of time and money, and so on. Also, please notice how I said I couldn't think of any more, just genuinely low effort, was not meaning to say there weren't.
I think that generally any job that has no immediate severe repercussions and where your employer can reasonably give you a probabtion period, you can just go ahead and do with enough knowledge. Such include (I'm only listing exotic ones, since that's what we're seemingly focusing on in this thread):
Technical writer
Salesperson
Consultant
Data Analyst
Project Manager
And in europe there is literally no gate to entry to lower level jobs like technical support or warehouse. Keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not in the position to be a lawyer or a scientist.
But even with all that considered, my point still stands: The jobs you can't do without a diploma, that's like 1% of jobs. (Likely incorrect percentage)
Aaaand on top of that, when you're in europe, you don't even really have to go to uni. Sure, there are lectures you need to technically be present for, but you can just go, say you're there, then leave. Then you have to pay like in the lower end of a few thousand bucks, which the university will even just straight up give to you if you're poor and you can just take your exams. I don't see nothing wrong with the exams, they're good in any way.
What's the problem here is the privatization of job opportunities, which for all intents and purposes doesn't exist on this side of the lake. This is a uniquely american problem we're talking about here.
I hIrE pEoPlE
The discussion was about the importance of a degree into finding a job. I hire people to work in research to develop novel drugs. I generally do not care whether they have a degree or not, but the degree does generally come with a level of preparation on the subject and a level of reasoning skills which are not easy to develop without formal training/working in the field. I did some times favor people without a degree over people with a PhD because they felt better candidates to me. Sometimes this is not possible due to bureaucracy. If you prefer, I do not actually hire people; I select people that should be hired with grant money I obtained to conduct certain research jobs.
I don't know how it works in the US, but to get a job in sales or as a project manager a degree is not required where I live. Candidates with a degree may be favoured by a company, but there is no law enforcing the requirement for a degree. And I do know many people working those jobs without a degree.
Regarding the fact that you don't need to go to university in Europe. I'm not really sure if I understand, I guess you mean it is not compulsory to attend lectures. I studied in Italy, there this was the case: all lectures were absolutely discretionary and you could finish your degree without attending a single one. That is except experimental stuff, which indeed you'd need to attend. You could theoretically just study from the books and pass all the exams and get your degree. However, lectures are very good for understanding what you're studying, most people were attending all lectures anyway. The fact that those are optional is useful if some days you can not attend for whatever reason, whether you're working or busy in some other way. This, however, is not the case throughout Europe. I live in Spain now, where attendance of lectures is compulsory. You do not get a degree unless you attend a specified percentage of the lectures. Many other countries in Europe follow this system.
In some countries in Europe you do not pay to attend university. In others you do have to pay, it's generally a few thousand euros per year. In most countries you can get scholarships and not have to pay such fees or even get a salary for studying.
I believe we're just misunderstanding each other. I do agree, for many jobs a degree is not necessary. But for many other jobs it is, or at least some kind of technical training. I believe the amount of jobs who do require some kind of certificate, at least in Europe, is higher than 1%. An electrician will be required a certificate to handle home installations and to ensure he knows what the normative is. A lathe operator will require a certificate which ensures he will not harm himself. A nurse now requires a degree, it used to be just a specific formation. Many other jobs are available who do not require a degree.
I'm not really sure to what you refer to as privatisation of job opportunities.
Nah, but you can do that in America.
There's literally an entire demographic of americans that are having trouble with getting a job because they don't have certification and it's a nationwide problem causing insane amounts of debt for the general population, so unless there's some kind of joke about the american healthcare system in there, then I don't get what you're saying.
I'm just saying there's been a lot of people pretending to be doctors throughout America's history.
Got it.
Only when you are talking about earning money. The smartest people out there are the ditch diggers and factory folk.
And what exactly would those two very specific demographics qualify as being smart?
I'm generalizing. There are more than two "very specific demographics". More than two. Let's call them proletariats for lack of a better word. The pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake is what I was referring to. The "going to college and getting a good job" days are mostly over, unless you have an "in".
Hmm, while I agree that no person is more intelligent than another just because of their status and that people who do their job often know better than their manager, the reality is that wealthy people are often better educated, making them the smartest. We just, as you allude to, have a privatization of means of production, but also of education. I would say the highest collection of knowledge, and thus smartness, can currently be found with high earning white collar job. Like lawyers or doctors.
I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.
Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.
Or in some cases, like FOSS, the knowledge is freely available, but you pay for a detailed course or tutorial to receive that information in a simpler, more streamlined way.
A lot of the time I paid to have it taught to me so badly that I would have been better off with a textbook. 😢
They then call me up once every few years to ask for a donation! Fk off, I'm still paying off the loan!
Exactly. Smarter doesn't equate well educated.
Yuuuup. Piece of paper literally to get a higher paying job. Only says you attended school, doesn't mean you learned anything or built skills there.
The library is free, my dude
It doesn't.
It costs money to get a piece of paper that proves you got smarter.
You can go to any public library and get access to nearly published material to learn from for free.
All you're missing now is academia. So go bum around a public university library and ask some college student if they canl check something out for you. Admittedly there's a money piece here, there's way around it, not all of them legal, but that'd be your easiest path.
I understand that most universities and classes allow anyone to "audit" them. You can go to the lectures but you earn no credits.
The piece of paper is a barrier to entry, an entrenchment of academia in the global economy.
Read some Ivan Illich on the topic (Deschooling Society), he's pretty lucid and still very relevant 50+ years later.
Free education would empower 'those' people. And the right desperately needs an other to denigrate.
Whoa whoa whoa we can't use that word man. Say "white wash" or "Jim Crow" or something.
Weird, because people on the right are less educated than those on the left.
RIP Aaron Swartz
It is wild to me that tuition is SO expensive and quality educational content is SO ubiquitous now. It does take a lot of time, skill, and effort to provide quality educational experiences, but man is it weird that it is simultaneously free and ridiculously overpriced.
University is overpriced, but a degree isn't just saying that you've gained knowledge. Being able to look up and memorize stuff doesn't mean you'll be good employee. if you can't work effectively with a team or tend not to finish a project all the knowledge in the world means nothing.
The most important thing most degrees demonstrate is that you can work for years on a project with multiple milestones involving multiple disciplines, work with others or self-direct, and meet goals.
Yes, agreed. Definitely value there. I feel like a huge part of university is demonstrating the ability to learn and apply oneself. So many people have success (like myself) in areas that they did not major in.
One thing that I think is actually an argument for big state schools vs private, more expensive lib arts schools is that the big state schools provide you skills in navigating "a System" and that does help when you get into the real world and the damn corporate rat race. Smaller liberal art schools might have more academic competition maybe, but less bureaucratic competition, in many cases. In many cases bureaucratic navigation skills, which are often more valuable in job applicants IRL.
Most impressive are folks that have gathered both the book smarts and the world navigation smarts without the need of higher education institutions and carved their path without going into huge debt or getting carried by rich parents who paid for their degree.
we had a bunch of gifted students in HS, or high performing, i believe we only had 1 gifted per semester/class. they were "paraded around" the school like they were best of the school, while at the same time neglecting the underperfoming struggling students, which is quite a large part of the student body.
alot of people fall into the trap of easy degree, like psychology, a studies/arts degree. yea you arnt going anywhere with a psych degree, if your not academically preparing for grad school like PSY-D, or psychology doctorate. i witnessed quite a few people that got a degree, and then complain about it. i had a cousin that did her psych degree properly, she has a PSY-D a while a go.
there is a suggestion going around in other forums,communities, that schools should start holding talks or seminars about different majors, and thier job prospects, but we know they wouldnt, because it would scare people away from these degrees that are money makers and coporations can abuse/exploit low wages for many fields.
our state schools in the wests, apparently were suffering from enrollment deficiencies so they decided to raise tuition (equivalent to dorms), covid exposed unmasked the problem with the schools thats been ongoing before the pandemic. basically people were graduating in the early-mid or late pandemic and they dint learn anything or dint have a chance to get any experience, so they all but criticized the schools, and probably warned thier family hs students away from university.
as of recently the state universities started to enticing hs students of early easier admissions, if they complete these x amount of courses. I dint follow up if the tuition is higher for these students as well. Some students criticized these state school, transferred to a more prestigious university for better opportunities. what universities need to do for stem is increasing the resources for LAB WORK, like make opportunities for more lap spaces,,etc, this is the most important part of a major.
*in the US. In Germany a semester at my university costs about 300 Euros and that includes cheaper lunch and a ticket to use all public transport in the whole of Germany.
You're proud of giving students free ICE tickets? What is wrong with you???
What?
I guess the joke is that in Germany the high speed train is called “ICE” (named that way way before the US department)
ICE ="inter city express", its the German high speed rail and in fact private transportation. But you can use the regional rail network in all of Germany for free. Non students pay 58€ per month for that privilege.
I know, this was just a poorly worded joke about ICE in the US
Is this a bot? It makes no sense
It is not about getting smarter. It is about transferring knowledge. For that, the teaching person must a) have the knowledge, and b) the skills to actually transfer it. Both do not come easy and cheap.
You simply pay a professional person money for professional work. And sometimes it is really, really worth it. I learned one programming language in an expensive three day course - from the person who wrote the actual tools. This was intense. The amount of knowledge and insight gained was marvelous. And well worth the money.
In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.
Education is now one of Australia's main exports.
same in US, most of them seek out international rich students, and you can see how much of these from the middle east and asian coming in with thier expensive cars to campus everyday. at the same time they neglect the rest of the students, so they dont prepare them for thier career track as there is very little resources directing to the departments, just enough to get by so the Professors and staff dont "revolt", they also abuse the adjunct positions to avoid paying them full time, or more benefits, if they can replace all the instructors with masters or BS level educations they would instead of getting PHDs. it all goes to wooeing international students, and sports. stem needs lab work as experience, but its so limited and small most graduating dont even know about it, or its extremely hard to get into. you can tell the university is being cheap if they use overworked professors to do advising.
Libraries are free.
Many libraries and community centers offer free classes depending on the subject. Local clubs can offer classes. Lots of youtube classes are free, like Khan Academy.
What you’re paying for is the degree on top of the education. A checkmark in a box that employers use to weed out people that don’t play the game of jumping through the hoops.
Access to books is not the same as access to a structured course with experts explaining the topics. YouTube classes can be very good to learn something specific, but do not achieve the organization of a university program.
In my country, university classes are public a d anyone can attend for free. You pay for the degree only. If it is formation you want, you can attend classes.
There are a lot more quality free learning resources than people realise.
Honestly, there isn't hardly anything you couldn't learn on your own. But what higher education provides is structure. It can be very difficult to actually follow through with the education if you do not have scheduled classes, exams you have to study for, deadlines for projects/exams, etc
One of the reasons some branches of learning are called "disciplines"
depends on the subject, math, engineering, stem need school, plus you cant really do experiments/ or lab work/procedures at home.
It only costs money to get the little piece of paper that says you did the thing and are therefore smarter. 🙃
I guess you're talking about the US.
Well, everything costs money there: education, health, safety... It's capitalist dystopia.
This may not be a popular opinion but I personally reject the belief that universities have a monopoly on education. In fact I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.
That said libraries are free, piracy is free, YouTube hosts millions of lectures by experts in their field and can be downloaded to watch or listen offline. I personally have spent the past couple years learning about the affects of US imperialism and haven’t spent a cent on it
Thus is exactly it. The diploma is proof that you're willing to play the game and become a debtor and can be squeezed - HARD - because of it.
free education on your own time only works to a point, when it starts needing a structured more advanced understanding of the subject. thats exclusive to universities, such as thing that requires wet lab work, essay writing,,,etc and also mathematics.
coding and computer programming you can do on your own, but an engineer , you would need hands on training.
Self teaching isn't a replacement for structured education. Making children pay money for school because the library is free would see literacy rates drop and is a brain dead take.
In my country at least public education is free. Higher education is paid for, I don’t think it’s a radical belief that learning takes place outside of university
So why should the financial burden of education be placed on the uneducated. That's what I'm asking here.
Ok, well that’s certainly not how you phrased it in the original question man. You kept it pretty vague and relatively open to interpretation. Might have been worth narrowing the scope a bit
P.s. the answer to your question is capitalism. You must keep the poor in their station so you can continue to benefit from their labor
formal education feels like it was fully co-opted by "the market"
If you want to join "the market" (have a job and get paid for it), you need formal education
To get formal education, you need money
To get money, you need to join "the market" or have someone who's "in" to pay for you
As for "getting smarter", that's different from formal education
Brazil's top universities, the ones everybody wants to join, publish research and look good on your resume, are the public universities. They're entirely free, and if you can prove you don't have sufficient income, most will also provide somewhere to live (shared, but still) and free meals.
In other words, high quality education doesn't need to depend on your income. Protest against that, vote against that.
Technically true, but as many students find out, having classes' times all over the place each semester means you'll have a hard time finding any jobs in the meantime, which will more or less force them to live off savings or family help, especially if the course has mandatory books that you cannot find a pirate copy somewhere. Also, the student residences get full super quick. Not to mention that every public medicine course in the public unis only has like 2-3 students that actually came from the lower classes.
Fonte: meu pai e minha irmã estudaram na UnB
There are all sorts of classes available at top schools via opencourseware. You can take the highest tier courses that the US has to offer, and become educated. While not degree offering, it still would look great on a CV, if you can somehow prove you did the work.
Free books. A few years ago, I read a free electrical engineering book available on the internet, which I found fascinating. It has been a little helpful in practice as well, but I think it’s just cool to know how capacitors and motors work. Public libraries exist for a reason. Gutenberg is another option.
Many 2 year community colleges are now free tuition if you reside in the state.
And of course, there are still ways to get a degree cheap, if the paper is important to you. I finally landed at WGU 15 years ago and it was very reasonable, and has paid dividends on my original investment.
To be fair a lot of college graduates learn very little.
Khan Academy is also free and amazing. It's possible with free YouTube and KA to learn nearly any subject you desire.
Formal education isn't for education but for the formal paper. There is so much information on the web, just learn from that. Also, libraries often times have material other than physical books
Formal education can be good for guidance. For learning the "unknown unknowns" as a famous scholar once said. Also, in terms of career, networking is the most important thing. The world is built on nepotism, unfortunately.
Hello, if you would please refer to "Wage labour and capital":
The price of education can only fall once the supply of laborer requiring said education falls below the demand of such laborers and, consequently, the price of their labor power rises above the cost of creating this labor power. The (even more) bad news is:
Essentially, because it takes labor to create educational material. Unless you own slaves labor isn't free. And in fact with the modern library and Internet access I'd argue self educating is more accessible than ever in history.
You can't learn as efficiently outside of learning institutions than within them. Additionally, certain levels of education require a structured environment. No amount of self education will turn you into a surgeon, engineer or scientist. These are professions built on decades to centuries of accumulated knowledge and require continuous external review from teachers to be learned.
The only cost to an education or learning about subjects, ideas and people these days is the cost in TIME, NUTRITION AND EFFORT
Sure you can spend tens of thousands of dollars and go to university, college or whatever institution for a whole bunch of years and learn a bunch of stuff. Or you can just take the time to read a bunch of books, study them, learn from them on your own time.
I never had the opportunity to attend post secondary school ... I read, I write on my own and do things on my own. I'm not the smartest person but I've surprised my more educated friends and family in my ability to know a lot about many things. I've also traveled the world to many countries and in each country I visited, I took the time to read about it's history, read books from there and learn as much as I could about it all. I also enjoy learning about the latest technologies, so I've learned to tear apart computers, put them back together, install, uninstall, reinstall an OS and just generally play around with computer systems often. I have friends who are teachers and nurses with qualification in many things and lots of education, yet they come to me to fix their computers and they're surprised when I can talk to them about most subjects about history, politics, travel, countries, science, technology and many other things.
I hate to say it because it sounds stupid ... but having an education these days often doesn't amount to much. Unless you have a well defined goal as to what you want to do and you have a lot money, resources and support, you get to become a well rounded, educated, knowledgeable and capable individual. Otherwise, the majority of post secondary educated people I've seen are just people collected certifications and diplomas to add to a collection and don't really gain much of an education in anything valuable.
Read, read books, read all kinds of things and read often ... it's probably the biggest thing they get people to do in higher education. There is so much content out there that is freely available. Read, watch and listen to lectures that are freely available in all sorts of sites and made by actual highly educated and knowledgeable professors and professionals. Find those free resources that are vetted, recommended by people you trust.
The other part of the equation I honestly believe is nutrition. Eat properly and eat enough of the right things. My mom literally raised us on oatmeal every morning. I grew up with kids who ate sugar pops or nothing at all and the majority of them didn't end up with a good life path. Then we seldom had processed foods as mom and dad were hunters and trappers that fed us a steady diet of wild meat and especially fresh fish. We're Indigenous so a lot of our diet was from the land ... we were poor and didn't get to eat much but the food we ate was highly natural and nutritious. Eat enough good natural food, enough protein and fats, exercise, walk and train if you are young and capable and all that nutrition and blood pumping will get you to learn more, faster and retain things longer. The younger you do all this, the better it is because the older you become, the harder it is to do anything.
That's great and all but individual learning isn't a replacement for societal structures that foster and encourage education. Society wide the argument of "just read books lmao" doesn't increase the education level of a population. These things are achieved by coordinated efforts and institutional education.
It might not be better ... but it is certainly a lot cheaper
Knowledge != Intelligence
But it sure does help. At least to also get out of your echo bubble and see new ways of thinking.
Absolutely, I just wanted to point out that there are plenty of smart but uneducated people, and plenty of well educated, but kinda dumb people
Oh wow I didn't realise that uneducated people need to pay for education because knowledge and intelligence are different. Thanks!
What are you talking about?
It doesn't. It costs money to get the diploma that's proof of your smarts. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz didn't actually get a brain, he got a diploma.
My son is a committed cinephile, and has systematically watched nearly every movie ever made, in any country, in any era ( it seems). He's an expert, by anyone's estimation. He just started back to college for a degree in Film Studies, because while he has the knowledge, in order to get a job teaching film, or working in an archive, etc., he needs the degree.
So you aren't buying the knowledge, any person who makes a serious commitment can get the knowledge, you are paying for an organization ( a school) to endorse your knowledge. Kind of a Certificate of Authenticity for your intelligence.
Obtaining education doesn't increase your intelligence.
Honestly you can't even buy an education outside of some technical fields needed in the economy. The only way to really become educated is to be a life long enjoyer of knowledge across many domains. There is almost no educated people left anymore since all of that has gone to the way side to make room for authoritarianism and orwellianism. Economics is a great example. Go to the most prestigious schools in the U.S and you will not learn even the most basic principles and facts of economics. Law is the same. You will not learn law as it actually is, but this totalitarian mindrot version of law.
Capitalism
European countries have capitalism, and it's not an excuse to have education for all.
Those countries also have semi-planned economies
It doesn't cost money to get smarter.
It costs money to get a piece of paper from old, decrepit, incompetent assholes who once got pieces of paper from older, decrepiter, incompetenter assholes.
Take it from a man who dropped out of three colleges after a collective ten semesters: A college degree in most majors is a certificate of bullshit satthroughedness, not a mark of intelligence. Take it from a man who made a 97% on the FAA's Fundamentals of Instruction test and whose flight students have NEVER ONCE failed a test he's endorsed them for: Most of the college professors I've met couldn't teach a cat to meow. A rare few of them could teach a fish to bark. And "tenure" is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of outside of the Republican National Convention.
In the words of Samuel Clemens, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Go to the library and read. Read books, read scientific journals, don't read white papers, they're journalism-shaped marketing. And above all: Try shit.
There's a motivational-poster-level quote in here somewhere.
One of my flight students had a Ph.D. in computer analysis of french literature. He would tell the story of a tenured professor who was THE world's expert in 19th century German poetry, but who was bathtub-full-of-artichokes insane. He would put on a funny hat and take his umbrella and march up and down the quad like he was commanding ze kaizer's own marching band.
It was my job to teach this man "A TOMATO FLAMES." The world has never made sense and neither should you.
Asshole on the internet is good, asshole on the internet is wise.
But seriously, go to the library and read a book, even people who deserve to be alive will tell you that.
because rich people dont want competition, so some fields are gatekept. like professorships, medical doctors, research scientists, probably admins that arnt acquired through nepotism. if have been a job forum alot of positions are taken by nepotism in general. research heavily gatekpt, by placing a arbitrary amount x years of experience in job listings even at the entry level. Also the top prestigious schools often breed elitist ass students too, they think they are entitled to certain jobs, or if they become professor, they think the way its taught should be higher than it would for that college.
some people are saying degrees are useless, they are if you are getting one without doing research on it before applying, thats on you. trades is not as easy to get in as you think, even if doesnt require it.
Higher education is a positional good. That means you're not paying to learn, you're paying to be ranked among the top X%. By definition only so many people can be in the top X%, so it's an arms race dynamic just bidding up the price of education.
That's also why Harvard doesn't create a chain of schools like the for-profits. They're not better at education. They're selling exclusivity.
It doesn't. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.
I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you'll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you're familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.
Because knowledge is power.
But also it depends. Learn on the job is a thing too in some industries, and in some people can do quite well for themselves here.
It also costs money to make money, if you have a lot of it you can make it work for you and make even more than someone who doesn't have it. This is why kids of rich ass parents get it so easy.
an important rule of capital is that in order to get it, you must have it
Where im from we have libraries and the internet. Now getting job skills. that is a tough one.
gatekeeping
To keep the poor undereducated and easier to control. The ones allowed through have to pay the entry fee.
For centuries it was called "gatekeeping." Education is the means of mobility. The elites want that limited.
I doubt the term was used. Perhaps "guild"?
Education as a means of mobility is a recent idea, I'd say finding cubic miles of oil allowed that to happen.
What use could a medieval serf make of calculus?
Irish and Islamic Arab scholars were widely sought during medieval era because their countries contained the last surviving copies of the entire roman classical canon and before, locked up in monasteries with monks and scribes copying them by hand, in all different languages, since the fall of Rome and the spread of the catholic and islamic religion into those areas.
In the dark ages, they were the only people with any access to information about the past, they spoke and could read and write many languages. Advanced mathematics were developed in Iraq in the 9th century, or even earlier in the vedas, and made their way to Europe in the 12th century. Fibonacci made a name for himself in Italy through these discoveries, which had a thriving intellectual culture in various regions for the larger part of the feudal era.
So no I dont think its a recent idea. The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world. The formation of an educated middle class is fairly recent, but as the middle class gets squeezed harder, look how the first thing to go is quality public education.
A sharp, curious and questioning mind is route to whatever passes for freedom in any age. Whether or not that opportunity is available to everyone is a sure indicator of a whether a society is more free, or more repressive.
That's not what is in question. The question was that everyone needs education for mobility.
Once the powerful got their special information, do you think serf #2 would get the same treatment?
"The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world."
A naive take at best. They wanted advantage and weaponry. Once they got that from one educated person, what advantage was there for anyone else to know it? If anything, it was to the advantage of the ruling class to make sure no one else knew.
Ah a rationalist. That's what I love about rationalism, any relationship to reality is severely rationed
Ah, a wiggler. That's what I love about wigglers, any argument they don't even understand they can wiggle out of.
A wiggler? Did you learn that on the first day at sophistry class at fallacy school? Is that a technical term or are you completely, totally, irredeemably full of your own farts
The latter.
There would have been a patron behind the serf to even allow him school to begin with. So the serf using calculus is because a Duke felt he had promise.
I'd argue it doesn't, and moreover you cannot buy intelligence.
Sure, you can buy some books with some stuff in it and memorize that stuff, or pay for a class on some stuff and test well, but critical thinking skills seem to either innately exist, or not (depending on the individual in question), within us.
I've met people with pieces of paper that proclaim them to be certified smart that are dumb as rocks but were simply able to move through the system well enough to fool people, and people who have no such paper who are more intelligent than the former could ever hope to be. Shit happens.
90% of what I've learned hasn't been in a classroom, since I've been out for decades, since before the internet was a thing.
As for why formal education isn't free... Are you suggesting I stand in front of a group of people and teach a subject in which I'm an expert just because I should want to? I gotta eat too, you know, and my expertise didn't come from just standing around, but many hours of effort, including giving up social time, hanging out with family and friends, to become an expert.
Today you can learn nearly anything online or a library.
The Teaching Company has university lectures on DVD, available in your local library. I've watched a few, and learned tons. I'm talking 300-level courses from schools like Columbia and Harvard, courses that are 40 hours of lecture or more.
History, Religion, Physics, Math, Astronomy, Music, Arts, etc, etc.
I'm asking why the financial burden of education is placed on the uneducated.
Private lessons don't make you smarter. They just make you more well equipped with.
I am a lifetime student. I am not smarter. I am not a smarty pant
1 on 1 is definitely more beneficial than 1 teacher to 100+ students.
Depends on the teacher and the conditions. If I can afford either a semester of lectures or a one time two hour personal tuition, I would choose the lecture.
George Carlin said it best.
You're probably not getting into the EU easily without higher education, and they don't educate non-EU citizens for free. Even if you get EU citizenship you will still probably have to pay until you've been resident for X number of years.
It really doesn't because we have good public libraries. But that requires that people have a desire to seek out knowledge. It's also why Republicans want to defend libraries
Gatekeeping education.
Keep the rich rich and the poor poor.
The rich got theirs and it's a ladder they can pull up to stay wealthy.
worst, gatekeeping many fields, especially some stem fields. bio research, and biotech is one such thing. very difficult if your even lucky to find a lab in your school that has space for volunteering. and i noticed alot professors are extremely reluctant to share info about thier labs for volunteering, must be done before graduation. i dare say it, also its hidden from students knowledge. another development is bio major is mostly geared towards the female student demographic now all the way to grad school too. the ratio is 60%/40% in number of degrees held by woman vs men(for bio), and more of them are getting MS or higher too. right now phd is still legacy of men, but it will soon change.
I assume you mean it costs money directly to the end user. Even when there is free public schooling, it costs money - it's just that someone else is paying it. In most cases, the government is paying for it using revenue they collect from taxes, fines, and other levies.
It costs money because people expect to be paid for their labor (teachers, administrators, groundskeepers, construction workers, repair people, janitors, textbook authors and publishers, IT workers, trash haulers) and products (building materials, books, computers, lawnmowers, mops and brooms, gasoline).
I'm asking why the financial burden of an education is placed on the uneducated.
Because they don't know any better.
Because capitalism
Cause people will pay it
Australia lacks public education?
Fair point to feel a little harangued by the cost of education, but the incongruity isn't quite so irrational it seems. This has always been the way of things - dues must be paid, costs must be levied to keep people in their place, this is the order of things, and has been for a very long time. The idea of a free education at any stage is a relatively new concept, historically speaking, and even then public schools' cost to its users (kids, parents who decline to send their children to prestigious private schools for financial reasons) are levied via taxation instead of fees outright. It always costs money, but the amount paid, and the personal/professional advantage gained vary widely.
Sort of broadly applied throughout history, it's a kind of way to establish and maintain the strata (see definition 3B) of society. You or your family must have the funds to send you to school, and if you can't pay to learn, you don't, and you go to work when you're deemed old enough. If you're lucky, you apprentice with family, if not you labour at any task which earns your bread, so to speak. The only real break in this system has been subsidy to ensure that less wealthy families' children can attend school to learn to read and basic math (as well as PE, science, literature, art, etc.), and people's ability to generate loans specifically tailored to post-secondary. It sucks ass, but please believe me when I say that it could be much worse.
And you believe the costs of education should be burdened on the uneducated?
Because that's the crux of my question. Why is it that people who aren't educated must pay money to become educated?
This isn't my belief, it's the general state of affairs. The reason for its cost isn't rational in the sense that you're hoping for, they want for you to either produce the capital needed to push through the ceiling, or stay where you are. It isn't supposed to be fair, it's been purposely contrived to keep people "in their proper place".
CAPITALISM
Everything must be monetized. Education, art, healthcare, food and water, it all must be profitable or else there is no incentive for it to exist. Oh, you need it to live? Then hand over your wealth! What, you're looking for free handouts? Nah, either pay up or go die in a gutter.
Money cannot make you smarter.
pay to win LOL
If only that were true. Getting a degree is just paying to play, your resume goes into the trash without the right degree or certification, regardless of what skills you have. Having the piece of paper is no grantee you will get a job, hiring managers will find the dumbest reason to throw out applicants, because their job is to turn 100 applicants into 5 applicants so the people making the decision don't have to work to hard.
Reminds me of that scene from Good Will Hunting
https://youtu.be/hIdsjNGCGz4
It was never about paying to get smarter. The original purpose of universities/higher education is long gone. It is now about paying to be accepted by high society and indoctrinating you. As Rockefeller said, I want a nation of workers, not thinkers.
it looks like that quote was first (presumably falsely) attributed to him in 2008
Because billionaires have an interest in remaining billionaires, and if everyone was smart, there'd be more people tearing down the structures that consolidate wealth and maintain wealth inequality.
The same reason it costs money for food and water. God created both before man. And yet here we are, paying for things we need to survive. Because capitalism is just super.
You don't need to pay for either. Collect and treat your own water from a stream. Go hunting or foraging.
At the end of the day you are paying for the convenience to not have to do that.
Let me just go farm on my apartment balcony or hunt in the local park. Not everyone has access to game lands and a yard.
You were complaining about paying for things needed to survive. It's nobodies problem but your own that you love in an apartment. The cost of that type of dwelling. Speaking of, you don't need to live there either and pay for a mortgage or rent. You have the option to build your own shelter in the woods. But it's pretty nice to not have to do that right?
Good lord, you expect everything to just be free? To expect you get basic needs at zero cost is a tad out of touch with reality. I get it, nothing is fair, but you are looking at this all wrong.
Nah. I’m just replying because it’s making you angry and it’s funny at this point.
Weird, I don't feel angry, if anything you probably got an eye roll out of me lol