[bonoboTP]

I live in a country with free college. It still delays maturation and life stages and makes the youth unproductive in their prime years.

For some fields it's clearly important, you can't learn everything about bridge design and civil engineering on the job, the structure and the topics that build on each other in an order definitely benefit from a well designed multi-year curriculum.

But for many people it simply functions as a conscientiousness signal stamped by a prestigious institution, when the material is not connected to the job.

Now, sure leasurely education is nice. I like to learn about medieval history myself, or about geology from YouTube and maybe if I had infinite time I'd learn more about music and the wonderful world of fungi. I guess this is nice, and if people learn such leasurely subjects to their pleasure, it can be seen as a good thing, a better life. But the truth is that most people don't really derive pleasure from learning abstract things like this. They are forced to do this because this is the way to get a job. It's a multi year initiation rite.

[dahart]

Hey I hear you, school isn’t for everyone, and I don’t believe everyone should go, and I don’t believe anyone should be forced to go. I only think everyone should be aware of the job & financial prospect stats and their likely future options, that’s where the general recommendation comes from. People who don’t know what they should do after high school should consider college as it offers the most options. People who know what they want to do are going to ignore the advice anyway… and they should! Motivated people can and do learn volumes and start companies and make fortunes without college; if only we were all that strong.

I’m jealous; the US could afford to pay for college for all on a fraction of the additional income tax earnings from college grads. We choose not to even though countries like yours have demonstrated a clear ROI. Many (I suspect most) Americans are aware of the ROI of education as well, but we have some special frozen place in our souls reserved for refusing to give away anything for free to anyone for any reason, regardless of whether it helps or hurts either them our ourselves. :P

So to be fair, most college grads don’t waste time studying things like medieval history, or fungi, or any other pure whims, maybe aside from one or two elective classes. People have majors and gen-ed requirements, and generally stick to it. My CS degree was delayed a year because I was taking music classes that had a conflicting schedule, and I paid extra money and a year of employment opportunity cost for it. And still, TBH, my biggest regret isn’t that it cost me, it’s that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to study even more music, and art.

One big problem with viewing college as pure vocational training, or of an economic tradeoff, is that most people don’t keep their first job for very long. Whether you change your mind, or get laid off, or get promoted, you’re not going to do exactly what you trained for very long. This is why getting a well rounded education and forcing people to read and write and do some history and math and language are all so important. For example, learning how to program computers doesn’t make good managers. But writing a lot of papers and taking Philosophy and English does, a little bit, perhaps surprisingly.

It’s a feature, not a bug, that there’s material not directly connected to a job. This is actually one of the reasons why companies want a 4-year degree credential - they’re interested in people who are competent in more than one thing. I feel like it’s also a feature, not a bug, that college gives people time to mature. How many people change their majors? Do those people get to change their jobs as easily if they work instead of go to college? Some can, but it’s a lot harder when you depend on what little income you have and the job market isn’t great and you’re not trained for other things.