[svalorzen]

I don't think the author is advocating for less education. The thing is that completing a university course awards you with a title which should in theory certify that you have completed some material and you understand it very well.

If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.

This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).

There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.

[AnthonyMouse]

> This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard.

What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.

Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.

But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.