Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
I knew nobody would bother arguing that education is, in and of itself, a net benefit over its cost. Much easier to be outraged over minutiae and tangents; if you accept that education should be free, then the numbers behind who goes to university, community college and trade school are incidental. These same arguments were made against universal grade-schooling back in the day, and were equally misguided then: we live in an increasingly complex world where high-school education is not adequate to the needs of business and government, so it will end up costing us more not to ensure universal higher education than it will to work towards it.
If the idea that somebody, somewhere, might waste a dollar they didn't earn makes you apoplectic, by all means continue with your anecdotal stories of how you made it thru school cleaning toilets and winning wet t-shirt contests. I'm sure your experience applies universally to everyone, so kudos on finding that unanswerable argument.
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Uni doesn't make anyone smarter or any better equiped to handle the increasingly complex world we live in, nor, in the case of most courses, does it generally add to the skill set the student.
The vast majority of Uni courses are mearly an extension of grade 12, they prove the student is in fact able to read and write and put a bit of effort into a project.
People have inate ability, IQ if you will, or though it is more complex than that alone, the bright ones will work out problems, the dumb ones wont, mostly Uni ensures the middle class stay on top of the plebs in the same way it used to ensure the upper class stayed on top of the emerging middle class 300 years ago.
As a country we would be far better off if we dropped funding completely for about half of all courses at a Bacholer level and took all those students and sent them to trade school, we would be better off with a strong manufacturing base than a vast pool of tertiary jobs at starbucks employing hordes of communication majors.