Maybe? The idea that "more formal education is better" is kind of silly when you dig into it. What value does it give society to have a huge percentage of people spend some of their most important years learning things which are completely perpendicular to whatever career they might do?
Education at this point feels like exploitation. We tell people that they can achieve greatness, they just have to pay huge amounts to a college to be educated, when the truth is that most of the value of college is networking and status signalling, and the value of those is pretty much directly related to how prestigious the institution is.
Yes, we should set up a system that allows all people, whatever their background, to pursue a liberal arts education if they're passionate about it. But a system that makes a pretty useless and very expensive degree a barrier for entry for completely unrelated jobs is just exploitative.
> Maybe? The idea that "more formal education is better" is kind of silly when you dig into it
If you believe that is true, then why would a country want to pay for it? After all, the world isn't limited to your strawmen.
The reason it's valuable to countries the world over, why so many want to pay for it, and why most all of them provide some level of public paid education, is it demonstrably results in a population that ends up with a higher standard of living.
Do you mean per-capita or over all? Because a very few countries with a bigger number of populations than US have free-education. If the former, can you provide a data source?
Yes but they also generally don't offer bullshit degrees that people obtain and then end up working at McDonalds.
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium all come to mind as countries with free or near-free education that while they don't graduate the same % of their population through tertiary eduction it's not for lack of available opportunity but rather many people choose not to pursue tertiary eduction.
This is actually a good thing because they are often choosing alternatives like vocational education that is more suited to their career choices.
Baristas with university degrees is the outcome of pushing everyone to get a degree and is common place in both the US, Canada and Australia as a result as all 3 have this same notion that you need a degree to get a job.
Atleast in Australia and Canada you don't also get saddled with crippling debt.
Sure. I'm not saying their approach is bad or wrong, I'm supportive of it. I'm just observing that it results in far fewer people getting degrees. Agreed that this may be for the best.
Education at this point feels like exploitation. We tell people that they can achieve greatness, they just have to pay huge amounts to a college to be educated, when the truth is that most of the value of college is networking and status signalling, and the value of those is pretty much directly related to how prestigious the institution is.
Yes, we should set up a system that allows all people, whatever their background, to pursue a liberal arts education if they're passionate about it. But a system that makes a pretty useless and very expensive degree a barrier for entry for completely unrelated jobs is just exploitative.