[delusional]

> If knowledge and prestige is all that matters, then don't take the loan, take the scenic route, get your degree slowly as and when you have the time and money, and one day you will have something to look back at.

Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education? Is there no value in handing over our knowledge to the new generation BEFORE they act without it? Is there no value in knowing something the "free labor market" has not priced in?

Rights are something we grant each other. If we see a value in an educated public, we can grant each other the right to get an education. There are no "rights" in nature, so the statement "you don't have the right" is meaningless in matters of politics, where the whole point of the discussion is to figure out if you should "have the right".

Your inner world must be a dead hellscape if you believe that the only things that exist are "prestige", arbitrary "knowledge", or a job.

[ndriscoll]

Assuming you were educated, your assertion that natural rights are meaningless is a good argument to me that the project of universal tertiary education is simply not worth it. If we can't even get people to see that there's a difference in kind between e.g. your right to reciprocal force in the event someone attempts to take your life vs. your "right" to have people work for you to do nothing but attend classes (when all of the information is already free online, so really it's just social hour for years on end plus a credential), then the value of the "education" we're providing seems dubious to me.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated

This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young people passionate about learning as much as they can in a given field don't exist, its that university is not about them anymore.

[LPisGood]

Why not expand “public school” to include post secondary education to reflect the realities of the modern economy?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Some countries do in fact do this by making post-secondary education free. But the key problem is the artificial requirements imposed by employers to people to have degrees to do jobs that in no way require them. Instead a degree is used as a proxy metric, and like Betterbridge keeps hammering at us, it stops being a good one once the everyone abuses it.

[ndriscoll]

If a program doesn't leave the student [economically] better off, then it wasn't about the realities of the modern economy.

[LPisGood]

If we need to meet in the middle for now and only make all degrees required for jobs free I would be willing to do that, but I also won’t deny the obvious societal benefits to having a collection of people educated in the liberal arts.

[ndriscoll]

I'll go ahead and deny the benefits of widespread tertiary liberal arts education. I honestly don't see it working; if anything modern "liberal arts" seem to be undermining liberalism. Certainly it's not obviously beneficial.

I do also think we need to reduce degree requirements. e.g. it should not require a university degree to teach elementary school. If we actually allowed people to fail high school, then a diploma would more than suffice. Likely the same for most "any degree required" type of jobs. Then we should have merit scholarships for things that actually require the additional education. Engineers and doctors should not have to pay for their degrees, but it should be hard to get them, and most people will not be capable. That's fine; you want very competent people there.

Some credentials could also be granted purely through tests again. e.g. my mom self-studied for her CPA. Now you can't do that. There's absolutely no reason you should need school for that.

[ericd]

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education?

Eh, I’ve often thought that going to college would’ve been much better after a few years of building software in the workforce. I didn’t understand the “why” of going into a lot of the subjects I studied, they didn’t have much real experience to attach to in my brain, and retention was worse.

I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

[delusional]

> I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

We dont disagree at all here. I attended a university that did project based learning, where each semester was organized around a single semester long group project. That worked wonderfully well for me, and I enjoyed the more freeform learning environment immensly. Those connections you describe is exactly what I could feel forming as I tried to apply what I learned to my project.

There's plenty of room too for what we call "profession schools" that do placement in the workforce. I don't think that fits everyone, but it's not a "worse" kind of schooling at all, and some people really like it. It's honestly quite difficult to accomodate on the workplace side, but if structured well, it's great.

I'm not against post teens/20s education either. I'm honestly for all kinds of education.

[ericd]

Ah yeah, another good method. We had some project-based labs, and those were definitely some of the most impactful classes for me. But those still tended to be somewhat "synthetic" projects, and we'd never really used even basic professional tools like SQL. I definitely would've had more motivation to spend more time learning about databases, for example, query planner, how to build, etc.