[forapurpose]

> The job market is not zero sum.

To expand on that, the more educated your neighbor is, the more productive and capable they are, and the better off you are. Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones? Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?

[DanAndersen]

Education is not a one-dimensional scale of more/less educated. I'd want customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and citizens who are sufficiently educated in whatever specifics are useful for their lives to be meaningful and happy. If we as a society can stop thinking that getting a B.S. is the only sign of smarts and high status, and recognize that things like trade schools or specialized job training are better for vast portions of the populations than imprisoning oneself in debt, then I think we'd be better off.

>Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?

I'll take the universal literacy of modernity, but there's actually a lot to learn from apprentice-based systems in previous centuries.

[elefanten]

But there are other, more ephemeral things that you want people to at least have been introduced to and grappled with a bit. Arguably a lot of the unrest in democracies right now has to do with people not being very critical thinkers. You don't have to have an undergraduate degree, but having some well of knowledge in history, politics and economics to draw upon is pretty important to understanding and interpreting civic life around you.

So there has to be some middle ground between "everyone must get a bachelor's!!" and "start shop class at 15, you'll be fine"

[geodel]

How come then there is so much unrest in universities nowadays? And univ students seems to be on forefront in making feelings based arguments instead critical thinking based arguments.

[elefanten]

The short answer to both of your observations is that they're misperceptions.

1. Universities have long been tied to visible activism -- the fact that we're at the high point of a wave now isn't particularly meaningful. There is no systemically disruptive "unrest" in universities -- classes go on, degrees are being earned.

2. The feelings thing seems like your perception. Yes, more visible and provocative and simply unusual speech occurs at universities. By gross volume, there may be more feelings-based reasoning that you perceive in universities. But compared to the cultural mainstream, critical thinking is much more visible and prevalent at universities -- it is, in fact, required a lot of them time.

[sjg007]

I don't think anyone expects a BS to be high status. It's one path. I know plenty of successful people in the trades. One thing with the trades though is that it can be hard on your body so you have to move to management/ownership as you age. But yes, education is too expensive. I think of student loans as a direct tax on education paid to universities to offset their direct loss in state funds. What I feel is immoral is that the interest is captured by private corporations when the loans are guaranteed by the Feds.

[forapurpose]

> I know plenty of successful people in the trades.

Good for them, but it's an anecdote. People with bachelors degrees make 70% more, per the article.

[Symmetry]

The question is to what extent the things people learn in school actually make more skilled in ways that allow them to create prosperity. Obviously many things learned in school are quickly forgotten and never used. But also obviously many of us make a living with the things we learned.

[lucas_membrane]

>> return to the Middle Ages <<

Why not? At lease Charlemagne could almost read and promoted education.

[kermittd]

Does the holy script of a degree confer these qualities?

[Caveman_Coder]

No, plus the question is a kind of false dichotomy...they present it as either you're college educated and productive/capable/smart or you aren't...it turns out you can be very productive/capable/skilled/smart without ever having gone to college.

[elefanten]

What are you reading? Can you link one comment that presented it that way?

Specifically, ggp that you're referring to was expanding on reasons why education is good beyond it's connection to the job market.

[Caveman_Coder]

> "Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones?"

[elefanten]

Exactly. Neither that comment nor its parent said degrees are necessary for education. Both were defending the value of education that extends beyond it's signal to the job market.

The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.

[Caveman_Coder]

They didn't say explicitly...but you have to look at the context of the conversation...perhaps I misread it