Comment on One Standard Yglesias
chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ll say we over expanded college in the wrong way. Turned it into a business. That greatly expanded the costs with little actual benefit.
Comment on One Standard Yglesias
chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ll say we over expanded college in the wrong way. Turned it into a business. That greatly expanded the costs with little actual benefit.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m always deeply skeptical of this insistence that college offers “little benefit”. But I’ll happily concede that it functions as a bureaucratic hurdle, designed to favor the historically wealthy and socially entrenched over the impoverished and recently arrived.
chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No, the added costs have little benefit.
College itself is great. The added costs have not added to the experience.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The costs aren’t really what’s changed. It’s who bares the costs. Teaching a student today isn’t materially more expensive than it was 30 years ago. We’ve just shifted the demand for school revenues from state budgets to family pocketbooks as the number of students entering college has swelled.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Well, it kind of is, though. Just look at the massively bloated administration budgets/staff.
thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 2 weeks ago
It seems you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the problem. The actual cost to educate a person hasn’t changed much in the last 60 years. What has changed is the amount of student loan money available and how it needs to be paid back. Since student loan money is very easy to get, the prices of everything at a university have skyrocketed. Also student loan debt can’t be discharged in bankruptcy and since anyone can get one, the interest rates are insane.
There’s a bunch of downstream effects of these 2 facts. Since student loan debt needs to be paid, only education tracks that lead to landing a job matter which has dwindled the number of humanities professors making the education materially worse leading to less well rounded human beings.
zarathustrad@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The poors can still get in if they are willing to become indebted wage slaves with a 6 figure debit for the next 20-30 years. Seems fair enough.
Just, don’t expect to get in to a social connection generator for nepo babies, you get a state school with institutionalized alcoholism.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They can’t. Those schools are all scams. That’s the real ugliness. Private universities charging six figures also have some of the worst placement rates and poorest post-collegate incomes.
Right. Because the degree is a social gatekeeper first and foremost.
vrek@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
In my experience I see a large part of the college degree is showing you can reliably show up and be in a state to use your brain. The knowledge you get is mostly not in classes but in the labs, most people don’t regularly do tests in work, the build things design things analyze things etc. Yes you learn some stuff in class but when you try to do it, fail, struggle, then figure out what’s wrong, correct it, and it works… That you will remember. It’s like watching a YouTube tutorial vs actually doing a task.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and charades about studying math, literature and history, to get a certified as “able to show up to work sober.”
If that’s your idea of education, you’re part of the problem.
vrek@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
No, that’s not education. My point is from a job perspective that’s what’s most important. Most jobs won’t require anything you learn in calculus III or classical literature.
Let’s say you are getting a EE degree. In a lab while learning about ac circuits, learn to play with an oscilloscope and learn how to really use it. That’s most of the value. That’s something you will likely use in your job.