Stupid ass private education bullshit
Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful about living in Sweden. I wouldn’t be able to pursue higher education otherwise.
Social infrastructure FTW, a far more respectable way to run the ship. I’ll keep with the boat analogy to use another idiom; “a rising tide lifts all boats” society shows wisdom in encouraging the kinds of conditions where their citizens can succeed without significant barriers, and improve the whole of it afterward (instead of the banking institutions which extend predatory high-interest loans) with their success. Hats off to Sweden.
I believe New Zealand does this as well?
Here in Sweden education is free
Free at point of service. But it’s 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.
Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.
The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.
Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.
According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.
More efficient for whom? And how? Because this is kind of hard to agree with when the efficient solution is a small amount of people with huge amounts of debt and everyone else not getting an education even if they want it.
I mean, what’s the point of public coffers if they aren’t being spent on public good?
I’m pretty sure you’re missing some sarcasm
More efficient for whom?
That would be the people paying less tax…
You can’t just compare GDP spendings and call it efficiency without accounting for the output.
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden? Otherwise it’s comparing apples to pears.
Not that efficiency is the top priority in my book, but sure, it’s not an unimportant metric by any means.
edit: … am I being Poe’s lawed here?
Does the USA educate the same fraction of their population as Sweden?
I guess that depends on how you value “Business School” as an education model.
It doesn’t if you know how to read. I don’t think of college as paying to learn; it’s paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won’t have a degree proving it.
It doesn’t.
It takes time and effort to gain more knowledge. It has never been cheaper or more accessible to acquire knowledge than it is today.
To increase your intelligence, is another matter all together.
I would also add that damn near all of human information is free to be had on the internet for the low, low price of a monthly broadband bill. The real expense comes when you want a piece of paper that says you know all this that other people will take seriously.
It doesn’t benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.
also competing with the rich for high paying jobs too. thats why its gatekept. like AMA, AND MANY graduate level jobs.
may start voting to the wrong politicians
In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.
Education is now one of Australia’s main exports.
same in US, most of them seek out international rich students, and you can see how much of these from the middle east and asian coming in with thier expensive cars to campus everyday. at the same time they neglect the rest of the students, so they dont prepare them for thier career track as there is very little resources directing to the departments, just enough to get by so the Professors and staff dont “revolt”, they also abuse the adjunct positions to avoid paying them full time, or more benefits, if they can replace all the instructors with masters or BS level educations they would instead of getting PHDs. it all goes to wooeing international students, and sports. stem needs lab work as experience, but its so limited and small most graduating dont even know about it, or its extremely hard to get into. you can tell the university is being cheap if they use overworked professors to do advising.
Formal education isn’t for education but for the formal paper. There is so much information on the web, just learn from that. Also, libraries often times have material other than physical books
Formal education can be good for guidance. For learning the “unknown unknowns” as a famous scholar once said. Also, in terms of career, networking is the most important thing. The world is built on nepotism, unfortunately.
Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.
It is wild to me that tuition is SO expensive and quality educational content is SO ubiquitous now. It does take a lot of time, skill, and effort to provide quality educational experiences, but man is it weird that it is simultaneously free and ridiculously overpriced.
University is overpriced, but a degree isn’t just saying that you’ve gained knowledge. Being able to look up and memorize stuff doesn’t mean you’ll be good employee. if you can’t work effectively with a team or tend not to finish a project all the knowledge in the world means nothing.
The most important thing most degrees demonstrate is that you can work for years on a project with multiple milestones involving multiple disciplines, work with others or self-direct, and meet goals.
Yes, agreed. Definitely value there. I feel like a huge part of university is demonstrating the ability to learn and apply oneself. So many people have success (like myself) in areas that they did not major in.
One thing that I think is actually an argument for big state schools vs private, more expensive lib arts schools is that the big state schools provide you skills in navigating “a System” and that does help when you get into the real world and the damn corporate rat race. Smaller liberal art schools might have more academic competition maybe, but less bureaucratic competition, in many cases. In many cases bureaucratic navigation skills, which are often more valuable in job applicants IRL.
Most impressive are folks that have gathered both the book smarts and the world navigation smarts without the need of higher education institutions and carved their path without going into huge debt or getting carried by rich parents who paid for their degree.
we had a bunch of gifted students in HS, or high performing, i believe we only had 1 gifted per semester/class. they were “paraded around” the school like they were best of the school, while at the same time neglecting the underperfoming struggling students, which is quite a large part of the student body.
alot of people fall into the trap of easy degree, like psychology, a studies/arts degree. yea you arnt going anywhere with a psych degree, if your not academically preparing for grad school like PSY-D, or psychology doctorate. i witnessed quite a few people that got a degree, and then complain about it. i had a cousin that did her psych degree properly, she has a PSY-D a while a go.
there is a suggestion going around in other forums,communities, that schools should start holding talks or seminars about different majors, and thier job prospects, but we know they wouldnt, because it would scare people away from these degrees that are money makers and coporations can abuse/exploit low wages for many fields.
our state schools in the wests, apparently were suffering from enrollment deficiencies so they decided to raise tuition (equivalent to dorms), covid exposed unmasked the problem with the schools thats been ongoing before the pandemic. basically people were graduating in the early-mid or late pandemic and they dint learn anything or dint have a chance to get any experience, so they all but criticized the schools, and probably warned thier family hs students away from university.
as of recently the state universities started to enticing hs students of early easier admissions, if they complete these x amount of courses. I dint follow up if the tuition is higher for these students as well. Some students criticized these state school, transferred to a more prestigious university for better opportunities. what universities need to do for stem is increasing the resources for LAB WORK, like make opportunities for more lap spaces,etc, this is the most important part of a major.
A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it’s a fucking valuable activity.
It really should be a challenge. The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.
For work, my team and I work with engineer types, and its been a 10 years span of helping them. The newer graduates are a mixed bag: some are bright and innovative, and some are coasters.
We’ve had young guys asking for help on a problem, and as you help they start replying to text messages on social media, missing the entire “help” session you provide.
We’ve had grads struggle with simple counting / talling.
We have done step by step troubleshooting documentation. Then field a call from somebody saying the steps don’t work. OK let’s see your system and go through the steps. Let’s check Step 1.
Them: oh I didn’t do step one, because it said I didn’t have system permission. So I just did step 2 onward.I could go on, but I should end this rant LOL.
Yeah. I was really blessed in terms of my upbringing that my family deeply valued education and taught me what was education and what was a stupid waste of time (which, some but not all of the public school US education I got was) and why the education was a vital human sacred thing. And so when I got to college I really wanted the real education part. It really alarmed me when people would be happy about the easy bullshit classes or upset about the difficult classes. Like bro… why the fuck are you even here? Learn HVAC instead, you’ll save some money on loans and you can probably make more than you would as a data analyst or whatever the fuck.
There would have to be limitations on how many people could get paid for some degree types. It doesn’t do society much good to foot the bill for degrees that don’t have actual related job opportunities. It could maybe work where just heavily needed jobs get wages paid, while other degrees are only offered under the current system.
Another thing here is that this would be another form of taxes used to directly benefit businesses. If taxes pay to educate a lot more employees for a job market, the companies in that market would directly benefit by being able to pay lower wages. I wonder if we could do a different system where companies could offer sponsorships for specific degrees in exchange for employment, similar to how ROTC works.
I’m not talking just about “heavily needed jobs.” I am saying that having an educated populace, one that can tell up from down as far as making sense of the factual world and world events, is incalculably valuable. They can be truck drivers for all I care, but if they can watch Fox News and realize they’re being lied to, the whole country will be in a better place.
It’ll also be nice if you have people skilled at engineering and things, the “job qualification” part is also important, but the Germany in the 1930s had plenty of people super-skilled at chemistry and engineering, and look where it got them.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they’re racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn’t a white christian republican.
There’s more detail but that’s the short version.
Here in Aus it was free up until the 90’s. When one of my coworkers told me that I actually nearly started the revolution then and there lmao. All this talk about how hecs is a good system from all these privileged ass old people when they didn’t have to pay a dollar >:(
The boomers, goat generation of pulling the ladder up behind them!
Something something bootstraps avocado toast. 🙄
Can you elaborate? I’ve never heard this before, and for most of the 1960s it was the Democrats who were the racist pieces of shit (to the extent it was even partisan).
Not saying you’re wrong; I have a vague notion that Reagan mostly was the one who ruined higher education but I don’t actually know that much about it. Is there something I can read about this though?
Yeah, so it was Reagan. It doesn’t sound really racial, it sounds like it was a reaction against the antiwar and student activism movement (which was definitely not exclusively a black thing). Sounds like it was Republicans, yes, but more than racism it was just part and parcel of them hating things that make America successful or enable us to compete (because that makes them feel weak, because they can’t.)
I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.
Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.
It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved
Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students… Anyone who wasn’t a WASP with wealthy parents.
George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn’t qualify for UTexas.
It doesn’t.
It costs money to get a piece of paper that proves you got smarter.
You can go to any public library and get access to nearly published material to learn from for free.
All you’re missing now is academia. So go bum around a public university library and ask some college student if they canl check something out for you. Admittedly there’s a money piece here, there’s way around it, not all of them legal, but that’d be your easiest path.
I understand that most universities and classes allow anyone to “audit” them. You can go to the lectures but you earn no credits.
It only costs money to get the little piece of paper that says you did the thing and are therefore smarter. 🙃
Disclaimer: I 100% support “free” healthcare and “free” education.
Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We’ve not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.
Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as “free” is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it’s something we all have to collectively fund.
Free to the user… Are you just trying to muddy this water?
Free education would empower ‘those’ people. And the right desperately needs an other to denigrate.
I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.
Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.
Yuuuup. Piece of paper literally to get a higher paying job. Only says you attended school, doesn’t mean you learned anything or built skills there.
because rich people dont want competition, so some fields are gatekept. like professorships, medical doctors, research scientists, probably admins that arnt acquired through nepotism. if have been a job forum alot of positions are taken by nepotism in general. research heavily gatekpt, by placing a arbitrary amount x years of experience in job listings even at the entry level. Also the top prestigious schools often breed elitist ass students too, they think they are entitled to certain jobs, or if they become professor, they think the way its taught should be higher than it would for that college.
some people are saying degrees are useless, they are if you are getting one without doing research on it before applying, thats on you. trades is not as easy to get in as you think, even if doesnt require it.
