[jdw64]

The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do.

Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.

When education becomes universally accessible, we don't get equality; we just get higher hurdles. Just look at the dev industry. It used to be that knowing a local CMS was enough to get a job. Now, you are forced to grind leetcode and memorize the deep architecture of tech stacks you'll never actually use just to pass the filtering process.

I don't think there's any real solution to this inequality. It's a reality, and any attempt to 'solve' it is bound to fail

[constantius]

So your post got flagged, and I wonder what was controversial about it.

Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality?

While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser.

I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequality would be the solution.

[jdw64]

I'm from Korea, and people often flag my comments as 'GEN AI' I really don't care about the reports. It just happens because non-native speakers tend to rely on the same formal dictionary words that LLMs use. Regardless of that, here is my take: the extreme widening of wealth inequality is a serious systemic issue