[pc_edwin]

The elephant in the room is the modern collectivist initiative of college/higher education for the common man. I don't how people don't see it, especially the HN crowd..

This article is shows only one of the smaller downstream consequences, it gets much worse. We are talking an entire generation indebted by trillions, entire areas of the economy with staff shortages, "highly credentialed" people working unrelated jobs etc etc

Colleges we always meant to a niche entity. Huge inequalities were not just optional downsides, rather they were structurally essential. Most people shouldn't go to college, most phds and professorhips shouldn't exist and most colleges shouldnt..

This is not a luddite take, i think these things actually should 100x but not like the way it is right now. The issue is socialism.

Government/non-profit funded high education should only be afforded to a very small subset of the population. The gifted.

Everything else should be private and amongst them most should be treated like trades/apprenticeship.

These ideas seem radical/ridiculous but most of what we think of high education these days are a consequences of extremely silly post WWII socialist policies.

I don't even have a massive problem with government funding either, this can be effective but not socalism, nothing like what we have now. More like military research during the WWWII and the early period of the cold war.

[steve_gh]

I don't think what uou are describing is socialism. You are talking about a market economy where organisations take risks in giving people loans for education.

Your alternative (restricting the supply of higher education) based on central planning sounds remarkably like the Soviet model.

[pc_edwin]

Thats the thing, there is no risk. No free market entity is going to write off tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on pretty much most 18 year olds.

Its almost entirely backed by the government in most western nations aka socialism.

In my alternative, we will eliminate government assistance for higher education almost entirely with the exception of highly gifted. Yes this is central planning but it is almost nothing compared to the monstrocity we have today.

[pc_edwin]

I guess the point is not some libertarian utopia, but rather to eliminate any and all institutions and mechanisms that fulfil this post WWII socialist idea of corrective redistribution.

We don't need to get into why this concept is deeply flawed both morally and structurally but if the following truths are reasonable:

- Not everybody is equal in terms of value output, importance to society and value deserved.

- The most important civilisation sustaining things exist at the tail end of distributions.

- As such these things should be held extremely high in society relative to everything else.

Then we can take these truths to make claims like "the CEO wallmart is worth more than thousands of employees combined" because the difference between a good CEO vs exceptional CEO is billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs (throughout the economy).. let alone a bad CEO.

In the same way, we can say the difference between a gifted person going deep into english literature vs the average person is massive. Does it really make sense for society to back the average person on this venture? Does it make sense for the person?

Without societies backing, it would've been nearly impossible for the average person to go into this world.

The key is average here, I'm incorrectly using the word. The lady in the article is clearly not average but is she exceptional? NOPE.

Why does her role exist, why are the such courses in such third their colleges? what happens to the students..