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Comment by twinkletwinkle | Hacker News Reader

Must the value of an education be purely the salary you can get afterwards? The true roots of liberal arts (which used to include everything from astronomy to mathematics to botany) lie in creating a well-rounded, educated, sophisticated person. We can't all study STEM, and we as a society shouldn't demand that.

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This is about the dollar cost of the college and university education process.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion here about ways to educate people cheaply and efficiently, more discussion of supply pricing.

It may be a bad deal to obtain the knowledge required for a degree in Anthropology @ $150,000, but maybe it's a great deal to obtain the knowledge required for a degree in Anthropology @ $15,000.

Not everyone wants or needs to get a well-rounded liberal arts education. The problem is that undergraduate degrees are more and more a prerequisite for getting any job, so there's pressure to make it easy for poorer people to earn a degree. Towards that end we have loans, grants, scholarships, subsidized city colleges and state universities...

I am afraid you are wrong there. It’s a myth that the reason we have public funding of higher education is to help people get nice jobs.

We have public funding of higher education because a better educated populace is a better democracy and a better public.

It's an intrinsic value.

That has long been the romantic ideal, but it no longer matches the reality in a hypercompetitive, filter-laden job market and economy:

https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646985-americ...

If that were the case, why can't you get federal aid as a non-degree seeking student? Do I need credentials to contribute to a better democracy?

I can only imagine that limiting loans and aid to the pursuit of an accredited degree makes the difference between financing a lifestyle and financing something that is guaranteed worthwhile (if we believe accreditation).

Something must be missing from the US formulation of "better democracy through education."

We spend a huge sum of money on "education" in the US, but the two-party, democratic government we have obtained for ourselves has left a huge fraction of the people dissatisfied and impoverished.

> The problem is that undergraduate degrees are more and more a prerequisite for getting any job

That is dependent on the economic cycle. In boom times employers hire anybody with a pulse, in bust times the glut of resumes for a job opening makes employers choosy. If out of all resumes for a retail associate job one candidate stands out due to his MBA and experience, he will likely get the job. That does not imply, however, that all retail associate positions now require MBAs.

How many schools successfully do the well-rounded bit? How many students care? I had a 1.8 average in general studies and a 3.5 average in math / CS, so there's my bias. And honestly the CS and math was poorly taught most of the time. Not a top 20 school (coulve gone to UT, but that's another story), but still a well regarded school.

Meanwhile, my well-rounded education comes from independent study of this and that and places like HN. I guarantee you that I can identify quality information and know more about government than most of my peers.

>> The true roots of liberal arts (which used to include everything from astronomy to mathematics to botany) lie in creating a well-rounded, educated, sophisticated person.

That's fine so long as you actually want to become the person that liberal arts education strives to create. That archetype is a lovely justification for four years and the student loan equivalent of a 2016 Porsche 911.

The instance or the archetype, on the other hand, is not so nice. If somebody ever called me "sophisticated", I would assume that they were being sarcastic or condescending. If I called someone else "unsophisticated", that would make me look like an elitist jerk.

As for being "well-rounded", liberal arts college education is both redundant and contradictory. It's redundant because we already have K-12 education to "broaden horizons beyond one's comfort zone". It's contradictory because the whole idea of college majors pushes students to be LESS well-rounded in favor of a specialization.

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