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Comment on If college is a scam, where do you go to get better education?

College isn’t a scam. It’s just something people say to cope with their inability to go, or their mistakes they made when they attended.

The quality of your education is mostly a product of your own personal efforts and investments in that education. Plenty of crappy schools have excellent students who get great jobs.

The passivity of your question belies a problematic attitude that college is a ‘investment’ that must give you a financial return. It can, but it won’t do necessarily unless you seek a job-focused specialized education in a lucrative field w/ many job openings, like petroleum engineering.

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Chronographs@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It kind of has to be an investment though if you’re going to be paying it off for the next 10 years, there’s lots of ways to learn things if you don’t need a piece of paper proving that you did.

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- AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It does not have to be an investment. Plenty of people go to college for free.
  
  The only people who freak out about it being in investment are those who have to pay full freight, and those folks already have money and huge advantages in life, even if they personally don’t feel that way about their life.
  
  Nobody at my school cried harder than the kids who had no loans and were so angry their parents had to ‘sell stock’, and they were especially bitter at people who got free rides or financial aid, whose families had like 1/10 of their parents wealth.
  
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klankin@piefed.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I hope none of this comes off as rude, but I have a very different perspective.

I think the ratio of the investment to most incomes is enough that it responsibility requires looking at the subscription as a financial investment. (except nepo babies but I’m rounding off the 1%)

Under that lense, its concerning how parallel some educational institutions run to MLM schemes. Like you could nearly word for word write your comment under a Facebook Omnilife® group, just swap college for Omnilife®.

They puts a lot of focus on an individuals ‘worth’ and how the experience will elavate only the worthy to financial security.

They both have to put a lot of PR effort distancing themselves from responsibility, cause inevitability some percentage of people were coerced into making an irresponsible investment and regret it (hell humans are so susceptible to this that pyramid schemes were illegal before asbestos and lead paint).

The stark contrast that entire risk of the investment is carried by the student/employee, yet the quality of education is guided by the institutions financial preferences is ripe for abuse. I’d argue its even a larger threat in postsecondary institutions than MLMs because of their cultural significance.

And like I said this can easily be a life changing amount of money, especially that early on in someone’s life that even irresponsibly investing could have better returns. Honestly its almost guaranteed cause this job market is identical to MLMs profit margins.

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- AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yes for profit schools are scams.
  
  But those places aren’t attract students who can get in elsewhere.
  
  Like, sorry you choose to fuck around in high school and get Cs and Ds and now you have to go to a crappy shitty for-profit school because no real college will accept you… but that was your choice to make.
  
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  - klankin@piefed.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I mean the market can even change so aggressively in the period of time it takes to get an education, that its a bit crazy to blame the students. Most are 18/19 year olds who won’t be able to accurately preduct the economical situation 4+ years from now. Like 4 years they were in elementary school, probably not tracking Nvidia’s proclivity to prediction market schemes.
    
    Follow that example it very well could be top of the like A+ kids getting competitive software educations, but again they didn’t predict the governments gulability to ‘shiny new tech’ so now they’re left with limited opportunities (but years of increased competition).
    
    And even nonprofit schools have the ability to do a non-insignificant amount of creative accounting that makes their financial bias an important consideration. Just the way grad students are universally treated is a great example, most do skilled, unpaid labour while being responsible for a profs emotional management. Thats obviously financial abuse, it reads like a 1950s married couple
    
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    AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeah, that’s life. Any of us could die in a accident tomorrow, or get cancer or a million other things.
    
    There are no gaurantees in life. And searching for them is a surefire path to misery and failure at life.
    
    Nobody can predict the future, some people get lucky and some people get screwed.
    
    And some people make really bad choices despite everyone in their life trying to prevent them from doing so.
    
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