Stupid ass private education bullshit
Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.
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.
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.
The library is free, my dude
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.
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.
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
Because capitalism
Cause people will pay it
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.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
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.
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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
… in america.
Everywhere. You can’t go to Europe and claim to be a doctor cause you read all the books for free
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.
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 ManagerAnd 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.
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.
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
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.
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
hardpill to swollow
Oof…not looking good for my case 😂
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
Ask me how I know.
i was giving you and other benefit of the doubt explaining thier side of the story
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
