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One day, they will be! They will be!

The problem with education is not overcrowding. If there's not enough space, they'll simply build more school or make more available through online learning. You can conceivably have higher education as an entitlement, no problem.

The problem with it is any time you receive something you don't have to pay for, you get something that lacks objective value.

This is already evident and exacerbated with crushing student debt. First, advanced degrees are already virtually free because of the wide availability of educational loans. Students are able to get essentially free degrees using money they didn't earn. Second, "earning" the free degree carries with it the expectation that students will be able to get the jobs they expect once they complete their degrees. That's when students learn the hard way that a piece of paper that says MBA will not open the door to 6-figure, executive positions the same year they matriculate. And with such a job market that is already saturated, they have nowhere to go but mom's basement.

The common sense solution would be to not offer educational loans in the first place in order to retain objective value within educational programs. While this means that such an education will become unaffordable for many, it also sharply reduces the number of students who will graduate with worthless degrees that won't help then in the working world anyway. A possible down side is that wealthy kids will have no problem earning degrees, but that ALSO means that for such kids degrees bought with dad's money have less worth that those bought with educational loans. It all evens out in the end for these students. Lower middle class and the poor, on the other hand, still have the ability to obtain entry-level positions which will help cover the expenses of higher education which WILL have objective value to them. Because of the actual worth of THESE pieces of paper, that they are earned over a longer period of time, that they are backed by actual work experience, and are an immediate stepping stone to an advanced career, they will do their recipients (and employers) the greatest amount of objective good.

Another possible alternative would be to cancel all current student debt. This is predicated on the idea that student lending is predatory by nature and unjust. This would force both learning institutions and lenders to CAREFULLY and logically evaluate the risk of making loans available in the first place. Nobody would be willing to lend money anymore, students who were sucked into the system would be given their freedom, and it would raise the objective value of degrees in the future. I mostly like this middle-ground approach.

But making higher education an entitlement that EVERYONE can have access to and devalue doesn't make any sense at all. Everyone will HAVE a degree that they can't use. Professors will be handing out worthless instruction. And tax payers will be paying for instructors to do, objectively speaking, nothing.

From Europe: Somehow you assumed space and money available for a university are unlimited.

I happen to disagree. I paid a lot of work into gaining my knowledge and skills. If I additionally paid equivalent of this work in money, my knowledge wouldn't be any bit more valuable. If - as it is common in private high ed in the mixed system we have here - I paid more money but less work, my knowledge would be less valuable.

My husband recruits programmers. Best ones are from big, state-fund universities. They have deep knowledge. The ones from private ed have diplomas but only superficial skills.

I don't say our system is perfect. Science and technology work okay but humanities in state-fund education are too vulnerable to political pressures. Every party struggles with bureaucracy and faculties have to claw for fundings.
Apparently for Americans free education is so unimaginable that you tend to see problems where they don't happen but overlook where they do happen. Free education exists in the world, you can travel there or ask.

And that's a problem with the OP's premise. No assumptions were made about money, so the hidden assumption is money is no object.

But overcrowding need not be an issue, anyway. If it mattered enough to the state, rural properties could be seized through imminent domain and schools moved to the countryside. I don't see that as likely as nobody in their right mind thinks education is THAT important. It's important, just not we're-taking-your-farm important.

Online learning is perfectly legit, though. I earn college credits through Berklee College to maintain my teaching credentials. I can't afford to move to Boston and attend the brick-and-mortar version, so the online extension is exactly what I need. More and more students are enrolling in online graduate programs available through public universities, not just the for-profit scam schools. If you really want a college education, there's really nothing standing in your way, most certainly not lack of space.



Where does the money come from to pay for school? If you have to work to pay for school and can only afford staggered quarters and summer sessions, you have to juggle more responsibility, research independently during off-sessions to avoid brain-drain, and be more competitive in the workplace while putting the skills you learn during your studies to good use. You get more out of the program from having invested more in it. Free education does not offer the same in value.

I think that's part of the problem of compulsory attendance in high school education. American high school students underperform compared to students elsewhere on standardized tests, and I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of value in education. Students who DO perform well come from families that see time spent in education as an investment in the future, as preparation for something that DOES retain value and appreciate. As long as education holds objective value, students will always do better. Your achievement, whether you realize it or not, came from your belief in yourself to succeed. You understood the role of education in achieving whatever it is you got. This is even easier to do when one must also recognize the objective value of their education. Money is a measure of objective value.

I dislike educational loans for that reason. Used correctly, loans are a collaboration between a financial institution and someone of ability who can maximize the bank's reward through applying himself through diligent study and practice. But this is not how loans are perceived by those who receive them. They are immediately viewed as "free money" that can enhance one's social life and supply alcohol. No older adult would ever give a child $50,000 or more to spend however he wants on the child's promise that he would work hard to pay it back, plus interest. So why do banks insist on doing that exact thing, knowing that after tuition and books stockholder money is being wasted on alcohol and fraternity dues? It makes no logical sense. Loans that are made based on merit with demonstrated performance along the way that can be reviewed and called in when things turn sour make more sense and hold students to a higher level of responsibility. And, too, it means there is less risk involved, people who actually deserve help are getting it, and there is less available that can be exploited for wasteful living.


Because in those particular programs there's more value. But then again, you have to wonder about those coders who don't make it.

There's also a debate on how effective commercially available coding boot-camps are. There are advantages to hiring those coders, those from private institutions over state-funded graduates. It's not a matter of who provides the best quality, but rather what the best long-term model for success is. Is there a student-debt crisis? You bet. So if or when that system crumbles, and I think it's really only a matter of time, you're going to have high school graduates that struggle to get in to schools at all. Best to consider alternatives to limited merit-based scholarships and educational loans.

There's also a misconception that private institutions carry more prestige and thus improve your chances of getting hired for elite jobs. Employers don't actually care where you went to school. They care that you can complete the assigned task. I graduated from the Crane School of Music, which is a state-funded school. Even if I'd gone to Eastman or Juilliard, I wouldn't have been any more competent a teacher in my early post-grad days. Experience that results in good work is more valuable to an employer than education any day.


How is education funded if it is free? It's not that you can't get excellent education without paying for it. You can get better health care in Cuba than you can the United States. Doesn't mean I'm willing to move to Cuba. But there are always conditions to receiving free stuff. If it is free, then faculties must depend on the state in order to survive. And that opens up a whole new can of worms. Can the state be trusted to fund education without injecting politics into the system? Can faculty be trusted not to inject their own political and other biases into instruction? Is the state really capable of making the best educational choices for individuals?

If education is free and faculty must depend on the state to set their wages, they are committed to receiving state income when they could potentially make more money working in the field. If they willingly choose a less valuable path, then they are irrational. But if the reason they want to be in the classroom is because they can't make it in their field, then they are incompetent. What value is an education when professors are either irrational or incompetent? If that is truly free, then it's a good thing you aren't paying money for it.

I can't speak for the European model, and don't pretend to. There's been too much trash accumulating in the humanities that they probably should largely go away. I don't have a well-thought, workable solution at the moment. Language skills are a MUST. Art and music are important to the development of the rational mind. I think all of those things are valuable. It's a matter if the state can be trusted to provide what's actually needed and not a cheap imitation.

I don't think you can learn more of the topic while juggling work and study like you describe than when you study fulll time. You may get more management skills but not more studied knowledge.

The state can't be trusted not to try to inject its policy. Can business be trusted? Nope.

Typically, professors here teach part time in private ed and do research (plus teaching) in state ed. I can't speak for the whole education but in places like my faculty professors stay despite possibillity to earn more elsewhere for the sake of doing what they like. Remember, we are not really a capitalist society here.

I think problems with American high schools are largely cultural - high school seems like a time when you are expected to party, not study, with proms the most important part of the whole stage - at least that's the picture I get from popular culture. It's different here. People do study a lot, as the final exam opens (or doesn't open) further opportunities.

I don't think Bernie Sanders' ideas of providing European-like socialism in the US are realistic mostly because of the society. It would need to adapt to a whole new environment. That isn't so simple.

What is the value of studied knowledge if it isn't useful?


Of course business can be trusted. If the point of an education is to prepare for the workplace, what better than the workplace to prepare? I've found that university education has been out of touch with the marketplace. In certain academic fields, the only thing they prepare you for is to be a college prof.


Neither is America, tbh. But that's a product of American corporations being married to the state...which is a whole other topic on its own.


You racist, you...


Here it's a lot about socializing. My kids understand that dating and smoking dope are out of the question. My middle school students somehow think that 7th period is everyone's bathroom break. I report them as unexcused tardy if they do that. I think they're vaping in the boys room. While there's really only so much I can do about the behavior of others' kids, I'm not obligated to allow my own kids to act that way. I think prom/homecoming and other social events are really a waste of academic time and money. There are better ways of introducing socialization.

More time is devoted to athletics and school spirit. I don't see the point in public schools. If I'm not paying for it, why should I take pride in it? The private schools in the area actually do offer more in the way of academics and college scholarship offers. I've never seen so many athletic scholarships offered as I have at the Catholic school where I work. I'm not opposed to athletics. It's just I don't understand why kids prefer to be ignorant brutes and why universities will pay them so much. There was a time when you could watch an American college football game on TV and they'd list the majors of certain players. IDK if they still do that or not. It was stuff like liberal arts, sociology, exploratory studies. In other words, whatever seems easiest while waiting for pro ball draft. Certainly not anything intellectually stimulating. I think you do find a lot of business majors, which is a great field for athletes to get into. Personally, I'd go more either exercise science or sports administration. But most of the student athletes I've met, though, I wonder how it is they have enough sense to put clothes on in the morning. Teachers are often pressured to make sure athletes happen to have passing grades so they can stay on the team.


I don't really care. I honestly don't. If people want to get together and live under an altruistic political system, that's on them. I personally don't care to and would choose not to if given the choice. And I certainly don't want to pay to support it. And that's just it...so much of my tax money goes to causes I don't agree with.

Historically, socialism just never works. The book of Acts in the Bible records early socialist experiments. Where the Christian community succeeded was where believers valued each other and wanted to meet the needs of others because it meant their own needs were met. There's an example of the cracked foundation of the system, a husband and wife who lacked any value of others and preferred to leech off the community. The Mayflower pilgrims initially set up a socialist community in North America. They nearly starved to death. And the failures of National Socialism and Communism are still fresh in our memory today. To get needs met in a Communist nation, you need the right resources along with knowledge of who to bribe. Simply growing your own food to meet your own basic needs can be considered a criminal act within a Communist state. I'm aware that socialism and communism aren't one and the same, but I do believe that socialism does lead to communism. It's a real, non-fallacy slippery slope from one to the other.

Bernie Sanders is a thug who makes his money off the backs of the poor and has never done an honest day's work his entire life.

Could you define "useful" in the way you use it here?



That assumes that the purpose of higher education can be reduced to workplace preparation.

Searching around real quick I found a post by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (https://www.aacu.org/leap/liberal-educa ... ic-purpose) about the purpose of higher education:

quote:

And yet the policy environment and public perceptions about higher education do not place the same value on preparation for citizenship, civic engagement, contributions to society, and community leadership as on employability. For many, the value is to the individual, not to society. And, frankly, the cost of college is so prohibitive that many families—and policy makers—are looking for a tangible “return on investment.”

In this context, I would suggest that there might actually be something liberating to the idea that getting a college education serves a purpose far beyond getting a job. What families and students themselves are paying for is much more than an accumulation of credits and a degree. It is more than knowledge of a particular field, training in a discipline, or even achievement of certain learning outcomes and critical skills. Many argue that the high cost of college necessitates a purely pragmatic outlook. And—no question—we need to engage in intentional and proactive ways to address the issue of affordability. But we can, at the same time, join in conversation with parents and students about the larger purpose and more expansive set of outcomes that students can achieve through a college education. Together, we can liberate mindsets by focusing not on the strictly defined goal of employment, but on the more humane and capacious goals of a better life, better communities, and a better society.

:quote

Last edited by la_fenkis on 16 Jan 2020, 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm a theoretical physicist

All of which can be achieved by a tour through your local and private library, which doesn't cost any where near the exorbitant extortion that is college prices.

New Zealand has pharmaceuticals drugs for a few dollars. If you need any medical care that needs to be done soon it's covered by the government

Also it hard to end up on the street

For a socialist country we have a pretty good standard of living

You probably nailed it.

For workplace preparation, I think a company-run school would be the best idea. They teach exactly what they want from their employees. They could even make some policy of funding education for some contract about working for them.
But, geez, don't call it higher education!

While true to some extent, there are significant advantages to having specific materials selected for study and a competent instructor versed in the subject who helps learners to understand that material. In particular, the idea of being a library autodidact encounters the problem that a person doesn't know what they don't know.

I'm also thinking that people seek out information in accordance with their values and goals. Some information has the effect of causing a person to reflect on their values and goals, rather than being useful to their preexisting ones, and so wouldn't naturally be sought out by people who aren't driven to. The topics I'm thinking about here are ethics, philosophy, literature, history, gender and race studies, etc.

My own reading outside of university suffers from these issues. I'd wager that having access to a professor well versed in my topics of interest would help me find relevant ideas I'd never know to look for. I've also had to take classes I was initially resistant to the material of but came to understand it's value as I explored it. If it weren't for the curriculum pushing me into it I'd never have been exposed to the ideas at all.

You already know my definition of useful.


See? Does the individual stand to gain something from education? That's what I mean. "Tangible" is a good word.

Useful, in other words, in the sense that you can DO something with it. There's nothing wrong with doing, say, research because you enjoy doing research. But research is inquiry into something, what it is, it works, etc. Does it actually result in material things that we can use? No. That's not its purpose. But scientific research does quite often produce knowledge that is useful for creating things. Is, say, science actually tied to something creative? If so, that's where I want my money. I'm perfectly useless at math, but as someone with an active interest in computer music, things like matrix theory and multi-dimensional arrays is sort of where I live now. Terms like Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors and projection geometry suddenly become relevant. I'd prefer to work with a mathematician, but I can't seem to get any takers. So I'm forced to learn math well beyond my one required college algebra class--which was really just a rehash of two years of high school algebra. I barely passed high school math but maintained slightly better than a 3.0 on the college level. So while I may be terrible at it, it serves a purpose and I can't get out of learning it myself. I'm not a computer programmer, either, but I'm learning a high level scripting language all the same because the musical application I'm interested in can't be achieved any other way. So my question is to what extent is education useful? To what extent is it valuable? There are positive answers to that, and they're those positive answers I'm interested in.

It's not that I think all university education is useless. I don't think that way at all. But I'm not seeing a demonstration that it IS useful, at least not from anyone on WP willing to discuss it. Studying data science is one thing. Building an artificially intelligent robot as anything more than a proof of concept is something else entirely.


You will have better communities and better society the more you have liberated individuals. Does all this knowledge free the individual? Do crushing student loans free the individual? Does investing so much time, even if education is free, and effort into something that may ultimately not work for one's best interest free the individual?

If I have better knowledge of how Python works, certainly I'd have more freedom as a musician trying to create something. If I understand certain math concepts better, that would certainly be liberating.

What I'm struggling with at the moment is scouring YouTube, StackOverflow, and Github among other websites to work out exactly what it is I'm trying to do musically. The problem I'm having is the tools I need to accomplish a certain task just do not exist, at least not in any form that's easy to find. So that leaves me with learning concepts that are comparatively easy to understand and THEN work out how to use that to solve my particular problem. I mostly do okay with it, but only after spending hour after hour sorting through page after page of error messages, sometimes only to find it was a missing parenthesis or an incorrect indentation, sometimes only to find a deprecated dependency or something that got updated in TensorFlow2 that renders all my work useless. I would prefer to work with a Python expert, but same as I can't get a math person on board, I can't get a computer person on board, either. I'm strictly on my own.

Certain fields do a better job preparing students for workplace problem-solving than others. Music and art are fields that specialize in personal enrichment. Is that important? Of course it is. But music advocacy when I was in school (hasn't changed much in 20 years) was geared more towards the whole music-makes-you-smarter approach while my own experience working in education has been that band is used for a dumping ground for the troubled kids and kids who don't have aptitude for anything else. I want to ask these people if YOU don't want these kids, what makes you think I do? But even with my own attitude, I'm still the most accepting teacher because I can take these kids and turn them into musicians a heckuva lot better than the drama teacher can make them actors/crew or the art teacher can make them artists. My class is certainly bigger than theirs. I'm giving concerts twice a year and am making plans to start a competitive program.

Personal enrichment IS my business. But music school, at least where I went, doesn't really prepare students for self-management, freelance work, and maximizing gigs. They don't even really do a good job where I live helping musicians seek jobs even as teachers. It's like, ok, you did your internship, no go have fun! So I'm in debt over $50,000--for, erm, WHAT exactly? My own personal enrichment? Yeah...being too poor to pay back loans and filling out paperwork to affirm that is ENRICHING. But hey, if I can just stay poor for the next 15 years, I can get my loans forgiven! Yaaaaay!

I don't intend to stay poor. I don't WANT my loans forgiven. I want that $50,000 to pay off. And I think that's the mindset of most students. If they knew it wouldn't pay off, they wouldn't go to college in the first place. Either that, or they'd have taken a much different approach. What we teach our own children is the value of personal freedom and how to avoid taking on debt to accomplish useless goals. I don't want my kids hearing me complain. I want them to get positive messages about education, the workplace/job market, and their own creative power.

If the question of employment is affirmatively answered, or the question of the ability of education to achieve goals is answered, then higher education is justified. If degree programs do not serve the best interests of the individual, it's best to counsel the individual to avoid them.

Nope, that's why I ask, so I can understand the extension of the concept as you use it here.



Ok, useful in the sense that it can be put to use. That's a pretty broad definition that includes things well beyond workplace preparation. Anything that gives anyone any capacity they didn't previously have is included. And some of these things are intangible, like capacities relating to being a better citizen.



Yes. No (but that's a separate issue). A description of the meaning of "one's best interest" would allow me to respond.