Why are we so keen to send everyone to college?
Why are we so keen to send everyone to college?
Okay, so I understand the statistics about how college graduates making millions of dollars more than high school graduates and the larger affects of secondary and post-secondary education on society. Btw, this is primarily because we have structure our society to see a Diploma as proxy for having acquired knowledge or skills.
Nevertheless, what is the main goal here?
At least, in my opinion, isn’t the ultimate long-term goal of college, an educated society? Also I guess, increased earnings or a better lifestyle.
Let’s go with educated society as the goal for my arguments sake.
So why don’t we start off by asking how do we get to a more educated society? Instead, often time, we are asking how can we ensure everyone can get a college education?
College and the current system/process of acquiring education/knowledge is clearly failing to serve the whole market. And it is producing a whole generation of people that have tens of thousands of debt. In fact, (1) “according to their Project on Student Debt, 68% of 2015 bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with student loan debt. The average was $30,100 per borrower.”
I think it is so absurd that we have created a system — a relatively frictionless one to partake in — where an 18 year old is signing up for $30,000+ of debt to be a novice at something (let’s say computer programming). When simultaneously companies are paying overseas developers in Eastern Europe or India a fraction of that for their expertise; expertise that they clearly developed at a much much lower cost than what the student spent $30K to be a novice in!
I am not against college, just universal college for all. The thought that we as a society should subsidize a system that is clearly an archaic, broken and inefficient way of offloading valuable information from one human to another just upsets me.
So let’s talk about building an educated society, not building a society where everyone goes to college. They are the same thing sometimes (at a very high cost), but definitely not all the time.
I bet you that if we collectively focused on that problem (the problem of “how do we get a more educated society?”), we would have much better solutions. We already have some new and promising systems of acquiring knowledge and education — like bootcamps, MOOCs, Youtube, Khan Academy and University lectures available to all.
Not to mention Google. Heck, I have probably learned more from Google than I did in my years in college; and if we extrapolate forward Google will definitely be the greatest teacher for me at least.
