to college. your option is to be worse educated or to be better educated. that’s why it’s propaganda. the right doesn’t want people to go to college, because then they develop the critical thinking skills to see through manipulation and corruption.
or you go to business school and you learn how to manipulate and corrupt and exploit others.
I also don’t know about you, but people’s critical thinking skills tend to disappear when those skills get in the way of their own profit.
Yeah I’d say it’s at the heart of every MBA program. Step on other to get what you want. Aka capitalism.
College is and never has been a scam. Some people have been mislead as to their job prospects, some assumed that having the diploma was all that they needed to do, and others have gone through the process only to get the paper and not actually learn from the experience. What you get out of it is up to you. Are you willing to continuously grow? Then getting a bachelors will be a good footing to start out on.
I really hate to break it to everyone. But even with all the capitalist fuckery in the job market, the second most reliable determinant of where you’re going to go in life, is your level of education.
First of course, is how much money and social status your parents have.
The idea that college = success was always a correlation/ causation mistake. People with degrees were also the people who could afford to go. Success is correlated to wealth and wealth to education. Whatever wealth was reserved for the educated is spread thinner and thinner as more people graduate.
If everyone has a degree, class won’t go away, they’re just going to have to sort us by something else.
The problem is folks think just showing up was the ticket to being wealthy.
Everyone told me my life was ‘done’ once I got into college, like as in college will let you coast the rest of your life. They were 250% wrong. I also had some friends in high school who failed out of college because that’s how they approached it.
Truth is regardless of your wealth, effort is needed to learn things. You either make that effort, or you don’t. A lot of people wealthy or not, refuse to make the effort.
Statistically postal code matters orders of magnitude more than effort
So its more like middle class ‘wealthy’ (BMWs, Gucci, Apple class consumer) families aren’t nearly rich enough to coast off of for life, but most actual rich families can and do.
Those are the families the old 50’s get a collage degree and become a millionaire ideas were based off of, before the imitation rich class existed as it does today.
That being said telling poor people that “they’re not working hard enough and thats why they’re poor” is a story as old as time. The motivation for that has always been to extract more work for the same pay, so I’d be surprised if the current trend is anything else than the same propaganda.
It’s also story that’s true.
I grew up in a poor town. Most people there were lazy and made bad choices and blamed everyone else for their problems.
Rich people, also blame everyone else for their problems, but they tend to make better choices with their time and money. The rich can be lazy and make bad choices, and suffer fewer consequences though. Typically rich kids parents will prevent them from failing, no matter how lazy and useless they are. Poor kids don’t have that advantage in life, and often they have to overcome parents who are in the way of their educational goals…
Ultimately people’s choices are their own. Nobody forces anyone to go to college, or not go. Nobody forces them to study, or not study. etc. They make that choice on their own. And given the nature of human beings, either way, they will be unhappy. Your zipcode isn’t your destiny, and it’s your choice to be happy or miserable with what you have achieved in life.
The most unhappy people I known my entire life are some of the most rich and successful, because they have no objective context and their life is entirely consumed by competition with their peers. I wouldn’t want their lives anymore than I’d want the lives of my drop-out deadbeat drug addict friends from high school’s lives.
The problem with lemmy and leftist (and right wing) thinking is you seem to think ones economic class is equivalent of their moral worth or ‘effort’ in life. It isn’t. Poor people are not necessarily worthy and hard working, anymore than rich people are.
People however, love to feel superior to others, so they create these narratives, pick a side they are ‘on’ and use it to ego-boost themselves in generalities whether those be statistical or anecdotal. Reality however, is far more complex. People mistake their bitterness towards other economic classes as a tale of good and evil.
And having been on both sides of poor/rich, I can tell you both sides hate each other for the same stupid reasons, and both are wrong. And when present with evidence of people like me, who bridge the gap, they basically tell us to go fuck ourselves rather than acknowledge we exist. And ironically they both sides I have ‘betrayed’ them or something, shit is so weird.
College is a scam in that it’s expensive, but if you go to class and put in the effort, you will still come out better educated than before. The big lie is that a degree will get you a job. It won’t, but it can help get a job.
It depends on what you want to learn. If you want to do a trade or tech, community college or trade school are decent options that are cheaper, probably more hands on, and don’t require the extra core classes that a university requires to graduate. With trades, you can try to get an apprenticeship somewhere and get on the job training. For tech, you can self study, build projects, and make a portfolio. Some fields you have to have a degree, like being a nurse/doctor, teacher, or lawyer.
If you want to get better educated just for the sake of being more intelligent, there are tons of resources available, many free. Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others are free or low cost, you just have to search for what you want to learn about. Some schools like MIT have free college courses that if you complete, you can get a certificate but not a degree unless you pay.
Came to say the exact same thing, the only scam (with any real college, no for-profit/etc. colleges) is the cost. If you can go for cheap/can afford it, college is a great thing to do and a great way to better yourself.
A lot of good stuff has been written here already. I’d like to add some observations from my side of the Atlantic:
- there was a push for more people to go to college up until ca. 10 years ago, since it was assumed that a highly automated service industry would need less physical jobs
- as a result, more people went to college who never should have gone to college
- as a result, trade degrees have been seen as worse, and have issues with finding good applicants
- as a result, in the last 10 or so years, there has been a push for people to get into trades
- this trend is even more extreme in Eastern Europe, where you can find people with, say, geography degrees working in ‘basic’ office jobs
- a bunch of local, external factors come into play as well, like the end of mandatory miltiary service in Germany meaning that the averade college applicant is likely to be younger and less experienced
I have to say that I’d probably trust someone with a 30-year old advanced electrical trade degree way than someone with a fresh bachelor in EE, even ignoring the work experience. That does not mean that college is a scam. Trade degrees (ideally) teach you skills, college degrees (hopefully) teach you a way of thinking. Both of those have value.
College. It’s not that you won’t get an education it’s that an education doesn’t guarantee a good job - you need connections for that. I heard college described as a way to launder privilege and it’s hard to disagree. Some non privileged have to succeed for that to be effective but it doesn’t matter who or for what. That said, I think it’s a better bet to get an education than not but don’t expect high pay to be guaranteed. Definitely recommend having a solid plan for the job you want and taking classes specifically to get there.
Community college/trade programs.
Almost nobody should go to university on a whim. Unless your career field specifically needs a degree, it’s pointless to take out loans.
You’re just starting in a bigger hole of debt if you go and don’t need it.
In what way do you consider it a scam? I’m guessing you live somewhere where the cost of education is so high that you think it doesn’t justify the risk of not finding work.
If your goal is just to learn, there are plenty of free or affordable resources online for many subjects.
If your goal is to find work, there are alternative types of education and programs with a lower cost or barrier to entry (trade schools, industry certification courses, coding boots camps, etc.) but unless you are getting a job through connections, it will be in your advantage to have some work experience, either in the form of a portfolio of projects you’ve done or volunteer work since the chances of finding good work without either a formal education or experience are small.
The additional benefits of going to college/university is that you form connections with people who can help you professionally and it gives employers who have never met you a way to verify that you are capable of committing to something if you don’t have any work experience.
If your only barrier is cost, perhaps you can look into scholarship opportunities or programs for studying abroad where tuition is cheaper.
I think its more just the pay to enter a raffle for the job market 4 years down the road can really read as a prediction market these days (Or enter a raffle to make friend with a nepo baby in your class).
Its entrenched in law that (and tradition) that many high paying jobs/projects require a signature from the owner of a specific sheet of paper. This creates a situation where the supply never actually has to cater to an artificial demand, which will always open the door to the abuse of power.
Funding research education is incredibly important, but at some point you wouldn’t be crazy to feel youre funding your move up an MLM administration department instead of actually funding any research.
Also I think its important to note the inherited accessibility concerns in postsecondary institutions. For example if its a massive benefit to network and its a large part of the reason to go to post secondary, do we just accept introverted people are systemically repressed? Its a small thing and far from the most egregious, but I don’t think things are as black and white as you make it seem.
I get the sentiment of “entering a raffle” when costs are high and job prospects are low, but no one is guaranteed success whether they pursue a post-secondary education or not. We can only do what we think will improve our chances given our current circumstances and the information we have available.
If you’re applying to a job where no one knows anything about you, you have to stand out in some way, whether that is a formal education, an impressive personal portfolio, or someone who can vouch for you.
So when I say connections, I don’t just mean that you should go in the hopes of “befriending a nepo baby in your class” but just interacting with classmates and professors who you can learn from, who could become references, or get you hands-on experience in an environment you wouldn’t have access to like a studio or lab. Sometimes employers will also look among students for new talent. Is all of this necessary? No, but many people seem to think it gives them better chances than the alternatives.
I’m not trying to persuade anyone one way or the other and this comment isn’t about what I think is right or fair. If you believe you’re better off following a different route, then I truly wish you the best of luck with it.
Pragmatic and practical advice and perspective.
This is what people don’t get. And to be truthful, I didn’t understand it either when I was 20 years old. Because nobody told me any of that stuff.
What people don’t really acknowledge is the ‘institutional knowledge’ is far more important than grades and degrees. And what people miss that wealthier folks teach their kids that stuff, because well, they have first hand knowledge of it. And that matters way way more than ‘connections’ and ‘wealth’ per se.
And when companies are hiring, your personality fit who the people who are hiring you is really the biggest factor. As much as people claim hiring is experience/skills based, it’s really all ‘vibes’ in the end. Looking and talking ‘the part’ is what works more than anything else, that’s why bullshitters are so successful in life.
I just think like making hard drugs and pyramid schemes illegal, its important as a society to support those vulnerable, as ‘fend for yourself’ individuals we only stand to lose. Especially when they’re children making massive financial decisions.
Its a moral failing in my opnion to not critically notice the current market, and adjust your opnion accordingly, otherwise your lack of effort will be abused, even though you won’t have to feel the damage.
So when the only connection required to get a job are explicitly befriend people who inheritly have access to money, because experience costs money, its not surprising that valuable connections are correlated to nepotism proximity (as it’s more common to inherit wealth than achieve it).
I’m very successful without a degree. I am atypical and would still recommend going to college
College isn’t a scam. It’s just something people say to cope with their inability to go, or their mistakes they made when they attended.
The quality of your education is mostly a product of your own personal efforts and investments in that education. Plenty of crappy schools have excellent students who get great jobs.
The passivity of your question belies a problematic attitude that college is a ‘investment’ that must give you a financial return. It can, but it won’t do necessarily unless you seek a job-focused specialized education in a lucrative field w/ many job openings, like petroleum engineering.
It kind of has to be an investment though if you’re going to be paying it off for the next 10 years, there’s lots of ways to learn things if you don’t need a piece of paper proving that you did.
It does not have to be an investment. Plenty of people go to college for free.
The only people who freak out about it being in investment are those who have to pay full freight, and those folks already have money and huge advantages in life, even if they personally don’t feel that way about their life. They also typically tend to be upper middle class types who are paranoid about money and have internalized the concept that if you aren’t constantly building wealth you are ‘wasting’ money. That concept isn’t as common among the poor or the old money rich, who don’t treat wealth accumulation as a ‘High Score’ you are trying to achieve in life.
Nobody at my school cried harder than the kids who had no loans and were so angry their parents had to ‘sell stock’, and they were especially bitter at people who got free rides or financial aid, whose families had like 1/10 of their parents wealth.
I have family who are wealthy who are incredibly bitter about having to pay 80K a year to attend a college… and they act like they have no other choice, even though their children were offered free tuition to state schools. But they are ‘too good’ to attend a public college, and they’d rather incessantly feel angry and aggrieved at how ‘unfair’ life is to them even though they have millions of dollars in the bank.
I hope none of this comes off as rude, but I have a very different perspective.
I think the ratio of the investment to most incomes is enough that it responsibility requires looking at the subscription as a financial investment. (except nepo babies but I’m rounding off the 1%)
Under that lense, its concerning how parallel some educational institutions run to MLM schemes. Like you could nearly word for word write your comment under a Facebook Omnilife® group, just swap college for Omnilife®.
They puts a lot of focus on an individuals ‘worth’ and how the experience will elavate only the worthy to financial security.
They both have to put a lot of PR effort distancing themselves from responsibility, cause inevitability some percentage of people were coerced into making an irresponsible investment and regret it (hell humans are so susceptible to this that pyramid schemes were illegal before asbestos and lead paint).
The stark contrast that entire risk of the investment is carried by the student/employee, yet the quality of education is guided by the institutions financial preferences is ripe for abuse. I’d argue its even a larger threat in postsecondary institutions than MLMs because of their cultural significance.
And like I said this can easily be a life changing amount of money, especially that early on in someone’s life that even irresponsibly investing could have better returns. Honestly its probably guaranteed cause this job market is identical to MLMs profit margins.
Yes for profit schools are scams.
But those places aren’t attract students who can get in elsewhere.
Like, sorry you choose to fuck around in high school and get Cs and Ds and now you have to go to a crappy shitty for-profit school because no real college will accept you… but that was your choice to make. Also your choice to be foolish enough to by swayed by marketing and bullshit.
I mean the market can even change so aggressively in the period of time it takes to get an education, that its a bit crazy to blame the students. Most are 18/19 year olds who won’t be able to accurately preduct the economical situation 4+ years from now. Like 4 years they were in elementary school, probably not tracking Nvidia’s proclivity to prediction market schemes.
Follow that example it very well could be top of the like A+ kids getting competitive software educations, but again they didn’t predict the governments gulability to ‘shiny new tech’ so now they’re left with limited opportunities (but years of increased competition).
And even nonprofit schools have the ability to do a non-insignificant amount of creative accounting that makes their financial bias an important consideration. Just the way grad students are universally treated is a great example, most do skilled, unpaid labour while being responsible for a profs emotional management. Thats obviously financial abuse, it reads like a 1950s married couple
Yeah, that’s life. Any of us could die in a accident tomorrow, or get cancer or a million other things.
There are no gaurantees in life. And searching for them is a surefire path to misery and failure at life.
Nobody can predict the future, some people get lucky and some people get screwed.
And some people make really bad choices despite everyone in their life trying to prevent them from doing so.
The problem is many folks refuse to take responsibility for themselves and their choices and change their lives. They would rather double-down and wallow in their misery and lament that the ‘system’ failed them or needs to save them. Because you know, if that’s how you think, nothing is ever your personal fault, therefore you never have to change anything.
Yeah but it still sucks when a 10 year old is hit by a car, so there’s at least some nuance to it
Education doesn’t guarantee a job. It is meant for you to learn how to learn and retain knowlege and depending on the program pick up some skills. Being able to apply that in the workforce is on you. Some people can do all of that without paying someone to help them get there but most of us need guidance, hence college & university. The part that has played havoc with the last 20 years of grads is that they were sold on the concept that degree = high paying career and that there are dream jobs obtained by attending dream programs at dream universities while going into debt at levels equal to buying a family home. Anything you ever do that needs financial credit needs to be fully understood and analyzed with payback determined before that debt is taken on.
The best educators still teach at colleges. It’s certainly very expensive but it’s your best chance to get a better education. You really do get out what you put into it. I challenged myself to get a degree by doing the bare minimum and while it worked, I was not better off for it.
Industry certification. Cisco, microslop, Comptia, Linux foundation, Red Hat.
Europe.