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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance".

Not saying that people without higher degrees are ignorant, of course there are many ways to learn. But I think many people wouldn't find the motivation to learn without the social pressure to get a degree. So that pressure effectively achieves a society with less ignorance.

In the US you should fix the problem of the crazy tuition fees that send people into bankrupcy, though. In countries like Germany, tuition is free, i.e., the whole society pays for your degree. I find this reasonable: as a member of society, it benefits me that e.g. we have competent doctors for when I get sick, and that they are the best possible (i.e., selected by knowledge and skill, and not by being rich enough to pay for a degree).

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> "But I think many people wouldn't find the motivation to learn without the social pressure to get a degree."

On one hand, I agree.

On the other, you hit the nail on the head. This is a socialization issue. As much of the USA gives a nod to individualism, the fact is we are taught to not take that too far.

The status quo feeds the higher edu beast. But there are too many blindly chasing the promise, and only piling up tons of debt. The wrath of Higher Edu Industrial Complex continues. No questions asked.

Yes. We can fix the tuition issue. But that also means saying "Sorry Charlie, you don't qualify." This latter bit, no one wants to discuss.

In addition, the truth is, cost is a function of demand. Edu prices - like housing prices - were driven up by demand; demand that was increase with cheap loans and easy availability.

Edu's charge more? Because. They. Can.

But everyone gets to go. Some use the opportunity wisely. Some do not.

But if the pay model changes so must the who gets to go where model.

All that said, edu is not a gateway to success. And the edu model is broken. It's going to implode. When AI replaces the vast majority of jobs (including white collar) then there will be an excess of edu'ed people with too much free time on their hands (and too much debt with no viable way to pay).

Perhaps higher edu isn't the only thing headed for a reckoning?

>In countries like Germany, tuition is free, i.e., the whole society pays for your degree.

The missing part of the equation is that Germany also has high-quality, well-regarded vocational education. In the US, university is widely regarded as the only reasonable route to a secure middle-class lifestyle. In Germany, about half of school-leavers go into the Duale Ausbildung system, spending part of their time working as a paid apprentice and part of their time studying at college. The role of universities in society is completely different when there's a good alternative.

The difference is that getting a degree in Germany is much harder.

I’d be okay with publicly funded education (all levels) if the admissions requirements were a lot stricter.

That sort of defeats the point of education as socialization (that is, developing the common language that holds society together). The only fallback we have remaining is pop culture, and if we let that be our main means of socialization, people will start letting actors and reality TV stars make all their decisions.

To the extent society needs education as civic socialization, it seems like it should be done at the pre-college level.

In the US today, it is happening neither in high school nor in college (at least for most people at most high schools and colleges). The former is mostly about keeping youth supervised while parents work and enabling sufficient standardized test scores to get into college; the latter about getting the piece of paper that allows you to get a livable-wage job.

As someone who graduated high school with a whopping 1.8 GPA I totally disagree :). So far the industry seems to like my work.

>> In countries like Germany, tuition is free, i.e., the whole society pays for your degree.

The same is true for most of the EU, except, notably, the UK, which is the other developed country, besides the US, where higher education is a proper industry and where students often get some serious debt to go to university.

I did all of my studies in the UK, though I'm from Greece. From the start I was struck with how much the public discussion around education is focused on money. It's not so much that university studies are aimed at getting you a (better) job, it's more like the UK society has lost its ability to measure the need for education with any other metric than how much more money you're making afterwards.

With the debate focusing on money like that, I think it will be pretty hard for the US or the UK to do anything about their "crazy fees" like you say. They now see those fees as a kind of investment: you pay some money up front to get a return to your investment later.

That is certainly a broken way to do education, higher or otherwise, but the solution is not to tear down higher education altogether. The obvious (to me) solution is to make it publicly funded again, as it used to be in both countries in the past, so that younger generations can benefit as their parents and grandparents did, without taking on extravagant debt.

> In the US you should fix the problem of the crazy tuition fees that send people into bankrupcy, though. In countries like Germany, tuition is free, i.e., the whole society pays for your degree.

It is not always free, but at least at public universities it is really cheap compared to US universities.

>I find this reasonable: as a member of society, it benefits me that e.g. we have competent doctors for when I get sick

Problem with this is, in the list of degrees, useless degrees far outnumber useful degrees.

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