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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed to free education. I'm certain free education is better than $150k education. But gating stable employment on 4-year degrees is problematic for reasons other than tuition costs, and, equally important to this thread, startups probably can't make college free, but they might be able to replace college for a pretty big set of white collar jobs.

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I think colleges should educate people and not only train them for a job. This is only really viable with free education and much harder to do with the alternatives which are discussed right now.

Sure, but training them for an economically viable life is certainly higher priority than a so-called well-rounded education.

I agree, otherwise the proles might become too uppity.

Thank you so much for teaching me the term "proles."

Haha, it's so useful. :)

Probably yes but I feel that general education is, especially in this community, a little undervalued. Democracy fundamentally depends on its population being educated and in more ways than just STEM. Better socioeconomic decisions are made if more voters are educated in areas other than programming (figuratively) and this is only achievable if this type of education is a viable path for young people, for example through tuition-free universities

We should better fund community colleges, and make pursuing a technical degree free. That is the degree whose goal is a job.

For a BA, MA, etc, the goal shouldn't be a job, but the pursuit of knowledge. Part of that is the value in knowledge itself, but it also gives you a broader skill set that can be applied to many kinds of jobs, where a technical degree is much more specialized.

I would argue against that.

Employers who require trained workers should bear the responsibility for training them (and control the process of doing so).

On the other hand the public has an interest in liberally educated neighbors and voters.

> I'm certain free education is better than $150k education.

Is this really the case? Sure for identical education free is better than non-free, but I know even in software development if you're applying for jobs in the US and your degree is from Poland there are places that won't interview you, let alone hire you.

In Argentina, the University of Buenos Aires is free and I know plenty of people who went from there to Google. They got better scores than Harvard in ACM last year. So yeah, free education can be as good in quality as paid education, at least in some cases.

sorry, misunderstood you, apologies.

Largely - It's not an education problem. It's a jobs, discrimination, and "qualification creep" problem.

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