The thing is, I think it is valuable. Understanding the past more broadly helps in making decisions in the present. Being able to write and communicate effectively is useful. A basic understanding of How Science Works is important for workers and informed consumers.
The actual content is valuable.
The actual content is valuable.
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That has to get paid for somehow. If you're suggesting public funding, I'm open to that, but talk to the voters maybe.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/922346
Discussion: https://tildes.net/~humanities/1nz8/
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Also administrators, and stuff like title IX compliance
The expensive part is having content explained and then someone you can ask questions to about the explanation.
Y'know, teachers.
Teachers and fellow learners are both very important.
Teachers facilitate that by providing direction and making the demands on self-discipline easier to bear, through structure.
Articulating abstraction---compressing thoughts into semantics and syntax---requires a skill all its own; works valuable mind muscles that otherwise atrophy.
Teachers are essential. But bloated $$$ campus infrastructure? Not so much.
Even within a field there are going to be parts you dislike and topics that you think will be uninteresting until you try them.
But going deep into a topic also requires the ability to think within the relevant framework.
You win not by sinking, but by frustrating the Other Guy in their quest to accomplish their goals.
At every education level there needs to be lessons on how to parse information, find good sources etc. College could be good for that except for inaccessibility $$ wise.
But there were powerful social norms against doing so at the wrong place or the wrong time... Submarining is an unforgiving business.
(Though what Rebecca says is also true - there's a huge sexist and racist component as well.)
Students who only spend two, three years in college get a proportionate earnings boost—it’s not just the credential!
Some of the 60's versions of these schools like Simon's Rock are already beginning to close.
But without a sense of collective responsibility, it's hard to make that case.
Why accept “they’re in it for the money so of course they cheat”—that makes no sense!
In Brazil it is pretty much the same - education is seen as a means to an end, a formality, not an end in itself.
Appealing on the grounds of inherent value is pretty hard at those prices (or astronomical loan balances after).
The academy lives on a cloud sometimes.
Everyone wants to believe “it’s just a piece of paper” and not the learning—what if that’s just not true?
But it should be said this was mostly in the context of entry level jobs--demonstrating why (say) a Romance language poetry degree is still an honest signal of utility in monolingual prosaic industries.
but also say "people shouldn't borrow money to major in useless ones like [insert humanities here] if they want a job"
Ironically, people with email jobs say this the most. Like, buddy, your time in college was a finishing school for white collar norms and manners. Your education is related to your job.
Why would anyone hire people from university field, which teach nothing useful?
Wouldnt it be easier just to hire people with right kind of education?
(and I don't know how to follow that up with anything more insightful... It's a whole discourse, and, as I said, perennial.)