Stupid ass private education bullshit
It doesn’t. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.
I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you’ll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you’re familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.
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.
I guess you’re talking about the US.
Well, everything costs money there: education, health, safety… It’s capitalist dystopia.
I’d argue it doesn’t, and moreover you cannot buy intelligence.
Sure, you can buy some books with some stuff in it and memorize that stuff, or pay for a class on some stuff and test well, but critical thinking skills seem to either innately exist, or not (depending on the individual in question), within us.
I’ve met people with pieces of paper that proclaim them to be certified smart that are dumb as rocks but were simply able to move through the system well enough to fool people, and people who have no such paper who are more intelligent than the former could ever hope to be. Shit happens.
Getting smarter doesn’t really cost much. Public libraries exist, go read books and get smarter.
University degrees though… Yeah, those are fucked up.
Or you could emigrate to the EU, where higher education is free.
Because knowledge is power.
But also it depends. Learn on the job is a thing too in some industries, and in some people can do quite well for themselves here.
It also costs money to make money, if you have a lot of it you can make it work for you and make even more than someone who doesn’t have it. This is why kids of rich ass parents get it so easy.
an important rule of capital is that in order to get it, you must have 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.
While absolutely true. I would say it’s much harder to find today than ten years ago. The Internet as an information source is being degraded on a daily basis. The amount of misinformation, ads disguised as information, and AI slop is destroying your ability to find that information.
Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free. You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.
Because capitalism
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
Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.
There are a lot more quality free learning resources than people realise.
Honestly, there isn’t hardly anything you couldn’t learn on your own. But what higher education provides is structure. It can be very difficult to actually follow through with the education if you do not have scheduled classes, exams you have to study for, deadlines for projects/exams, etc
It was never about paying to get smarter. The original purpose of universities/higher education is long gone. It is now about paying to be accepted by high society and indoctrinating you. As Rockefeller said, I want a nation of workers, not thinkers.
Private lessons don’t make you smarter. They just make you more well equipped with.
I am a lifetime student. I am not smarter. I am not a smarty pant
It doesn’t.
You need to study to be smart and studying is free.
Check out this pedantic guy over here. Just to be clear, knowledge means shit, it’s the diploma that counts
I guarantee you, knowledge means something. You need the degree to get the job, but if you don’t know your ass for your elbow, that entry level job is as far as you are going to go. If you want a promotion and pay raise, you need to know your shit.
Only when you are talking about earning money. The smartest people out there are the ditch diggers and factory folk.
And what exactly would those two very specific demographics qualify as being smart?
I’m generalizing. There are more than two “very specific demographics”. More than two. Let’s call them proletariats for lack of a better word. The pursuit of knowledge for it’s own sake is what I was referring to. The “going to college and getting a good job” days are mostly over, unless you have an “in”.
Hmm, while I agree that no person is more intelligent than another just because of their status and that people who do their job often know better than their manager, the reality is that wealthy people are often better educated, making them the smartest. We just, as you allude to, have a privatization of means of production, but also of education. I would say the highest collection of knowledge, and thus smartness, can currently be found with high earning white collar job. Like lawyers or doctors.
… in america.
Everywhere. You can’t go to Europe and claim to be a doctor cause you read all the books for free
In healthcare, yes. An IT guy, a plumber, an analyst, no. Legal and healthcare are the only two fields I can think of right now that a person with enough knowledge couldn’t enter without a diploma.
But those two fields make up what, 1 percent?Also, I don’t need to go to europe, because I’m already there.
There are many other fields that require a degree. Engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology, etc. In some of those fields you can find some jobs which you can do without the degree, but the vast majority do require it.
I hire people and, to be fair, most people with a degree do not qualify as valid for certain jobs. But in that case is lack of knowledge. In my case I’d rather have someone without degree but with a deep knowledge; but those are very hard to find.
Ok, first off, I don’t give a shit who you are or what you do, that’s not what this is about and unless your job has to do with looking at such topics in a scientific and non subjective way, which I did not read from you, your opinion matters just as much as anyone elses, just like mine.
Coming back to nicer grounds, yes, for the fields you have mentioned, that’s absolutely true. Those fields are quite critical and in my opinion should be gated by a diploma. You don’t just get to call yourself and architect and draft a building that collapses. Same with a chemist and accidentally poisoning the groundwater or being a scientist in general and wasting a lot of time and money, and so on. Also, please notice how I said I couldn’t think of any more, just genuinely low effort, was not meaning to say there weren’t.
I think that generally any job that has no immediate severe repercussions and where your employer can reasonably give you a probabtion period, you can just go ahead and do with enough knowledge. Such include (I’m only listing exotic ones, since that’s what we’re seemingly focusing on in this thread):
Technical writer
Salesperson
Consultant
Data Analyst
Project ManagerAnd in europe there is literally no gate to entry to lower level jobs like technical support or warehouse. Keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not in the position to be a lawyer or a scientist.
But even with all that considered, my point still stands: The jobs you can’t do without a diploma, that’s like 1% of jobs. (Likely incorrect percentage)
Aaaand on top of that, when you’re in europe, you don’t even really have to go to uni. Sure, there are lectures you need to technically be present for, but you can just go, say you’re there, then leave. Then you have to pay like in the lower end of a few thousand bucks, which the university will even just straight up give to you if you’re poor and you can just take your exams. I don’t see nothing wrong with the exams, they’re good in any way.
What’s the problem here is the privatization of job opportunities, which for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist on this side of the lake. This is a uniquely american problem we’re talking about here.
I hIrE pEoPlE
The discussion was about the importance of a degree into finding a job. I hire people to work in research to develop novel drugs. I generally do not care whether they have a degree or not, but the degree does generally come with a level of preparation on the subject and a level of reasoning skills which are not easy to develop without formal training/working in the field. I did some times favor people without a degree over people with a PhD because they felt better candidates to me. Sometimes this is not possible due to bureaucracy. If you prefer, I do not actually hire people; I select people that should be hired with grant money I obtained to conduct certain research jobs.
I don’t know how it works in the US, but to get a job in sales or as a project manager a degree is not required where I live. Candidates with a degree may be favoured by a company, but there is no law enforcing the requirement for a degree. And I do know many people working those jobs without a degree.
Regarding the fact that you don’t need to go to university in Europe. I’m not really sure if I understand, I guess you mean it is not compulsory to attend lectures. I studied in Italy, there this was the case: all lectures were absolutely discretionary and you could finish your degree without attending a single one. That is except experimental stuff, which indeed you’d need to attend. You could theoretically just study from the books and pass all the exams and get your degree. However, lectures are very good for understanding what you’re studying, most people were attending all lectures anyway. The fact that those are optional is useful if some days you can not attend for whatever reason, whether you’re working or busy in some other way. This, however, is not the case throughout Europe. I live in Spain now, where attendance of lectures is compulsory. You do not get a degree unless you attend a specified percentage of the lectures. Many other countries in Europe follow this system.
In some countries in Europe you do not pay to attend university. In others you do have to pay, it’s generally a few thousand euros per year. In most countries you can get scholarships and not have to pay such fees or even get a salary for studying.
I believe we’re just misunderstanding each other. I do agree, for many jobs a degree is not necessary. But for many other jobs it is, or at least some kind of technical training. I believe the amount of jobs who do require some kind of certificate, at least in Europe, is higher than 1%. An electrician will be required a certificate to handle home installations and to ensure he knows what the normative is. A lathe operator will require a certificate which ensures he will not harm himself. A nurse now requires a degree, it used to be just a specific formation. Many other jobs are available who do not require a degree.
I’m not really sure to what you refer to as privatisation of job opportunities.
It doesn’t cost money to get smarter.
It costs money to get a piece of paper from old, decrepit, incompetent assholes who once got pieces of paper from older, decrepiter, incompetenter assholes.
Take it from a man who dropped out of three colleges after a collective ten semesters: A college degree in most majors is a certificate of bullshit satthroughedness, not a mark of intelligence. Take it from a man who made a 97% on the FAA’s Fundamentals of Instruction test and whose flight students have NEVER ONCE failed a test he’s endorsed them for: Most of the college professors I’ve met couldn’t teach a cat to meow. A rare few of them could teach a fish to bark. And “tenure” is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of outside of the Republican National Convention.
In the words of Samuel Clemens, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Go to the library and read. Read books, read scientific journals, don’t read white papers, they’re journalism-shaped marketing. And above all: Try shit.
