Education is important. Raising the overall level of education in this country should be a much larger goal that it seems to be.
On one level, I totally agree. At the same time, well-meaning attempts to make college loans available to everyone for everything seem to have massively bloated the cost of education to a crippling degree. I think the key is in the how of the approach.
Of course everything else has this issue as well. The only difference is most of us start small, and if it works we expand. You can't do that easily for national programs.
Is this American exceptionalism? Many nations do this, with great results.
I'm not so sure about this as a cause. If you look at the costs for colleges that have increased over time, you can start to see where a lot of this money is going. Spending on new and maintaining aging technology is increased. And now you have entire departments like Title IX that never existed in prior school models.
And with expansion, additional management overhead now exists. There is seemly at least a Director of <insert title here> for everything.
I would argue some of the things you list as causes of increasing tuition are the effects of tuition surpluses from additional income from a trillion in student loans.
I think some decisions lately have highlighted an open hostility towards science, education, and by implication, democracy. This needs to be reversed.
I understand it's changed recently, but colleges (and lower schools) traditionally had a very conservative curriculum in general education / liberal arts core of Economics, Literature, and History.
Would a person who only knew apprenticeships trust someone who sat through 4 years of theoretical lectures, book learning, and "sample projects", when their expectation is that trained apprentices have worked side-by-side with masters in "the real world" for many years, doing real work that real people depended on?
Also Educated != smart. You can have plenty of educated people but still have bad outcomes in society. If only smart people could vote then that would go a long way to fixing society, but again, a solution like that is immediately off the table. So there are ways and means to fix any and every problem, the problem is nobody will use the tools or they are not even smart enough to know that the wrench is for turning bolts in the first place (the don't even realize the solution in staring them in the face in other words.)
I envision a day where everyone enjoys the "right" to a PhD. We will be very smart then, won't we?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/when-the-left-tur...
Consider why so many comedians (e.g., Jerry Seinfeld) are no longer performing at colleges. They say it's become unbearable. That's a big clue that free speech is not welcome.
Look at how guest lecturers and ideas are getting shut down. University used to be the bastion of free speech and ideas, but that is increasingly under threat. Just watch what happened at this lecture at Queen's University to see an example how bad it's getting: https://youtu.be/MwdYpMS8s28?t=9m44s
Distinguished professors trying to have a well reasoned and peaceful discussion with students. And that wasn't just disrupted, the doors were barricaded and people were pounding on the windows (breaking at least one) throughout the remainder of the event. Outside it was even yelled "Lock em in and burn it down". Seriously, watch the whole thing (followed by footage of what happened outside) and I think you'll be taken aback.
These are not cases of shitty things being called out, it goes way beyond that.
And the person in the video, Jordan Peterson, is someone who expresses views that basically say that a lot of people don't deserve to have freedom. He claims that women should not be able to leave abusive marriages. He claims that gay marriage should not be legal at all. He's used a lot of pseudoscience to make it appear as if he's being rational, when really all he's doing is expressing disdain and scorn for lots of marginalized groups. And I can't be upset with those groups for finally getting tired of him disparaging them, and telling him to shove it.
Students asked for white people to not come to the college for a day, a white professor disagreed with this, the students called for him to be fired.
Pressuring people of a certain race to stay home seems wrong, and I don't think the professor is shitty for standing up to it.
A liberal arts degree can be worth it, but only if it is actually a program with effort in it.
I think this is a decent list of acceptable majors/concentrations (outside a trade specific school perhaps):
https://college.harvard.edu/academics/fields-study/concentra...
But it is important to clarify: education in what is important.
I think there is massive difficulty in forming any sort of consensus approach to define a proper baseline of 'education' that works for everyone. Our school systems are frankly not designed for it, and it seems a utopian ideal that they may be 'corrected' to do so. Considering the diversity of motivators and systems/tactics used for schooling across cities/counties/states and the content that is covered/ignored, is it realistic to attempt to measure a 'baseline of education'?
To me it comes down to structuring a better formal definition of 'education' at a societal level. Economic utility is the obvious motivator in today's society, which pumps up many fields of 'education', but hinders the perceived importance of other fields. Some forms or fields of education that are not covered in our modern schooling systems may actually improve the education baseline, and vice versa with some content currently covered.
University was mostly a core of classes that everybody needed to take, free electives that let me take whichever classes I wanted, and then degree courses which were a subset of my classes.
We over-fixate on the major in these discussions because we look at the crazy American education prices and then think in $/major. But otherwise I'd say university does a decent job of making people credentialize in generally important concepts. And this process helps you in life, like being able to think and speak intelligently on any topic.
I think it's the gross expense of uni that causes us to push people into majors like STEM that can be directly transmuted into dollars. But I don't think that's best for society. And it's an unhealthy approach to education.
For example, if I could redo university, I would've majored in philosophy. It's just obnoxious that I had to make that decision somewhere within age 17-20.
I agree with your take about STEM majors being pushed due to both ROI potential and/or market demand for skills. I also agree that this is an unhealthy approach to education. However, I don't see this changing. I see it as the fundamental motivator of education for many people. Likely, the people to which I am referring are not readers of this site, who are of the highest skills in their respective fields (most likely technical).
I am interested in your opinion that "university does a decent job of making people credentialize in generally important concepts" but then following with your personal interest (later realized) in an education based on (and in) philosophy.
I think this actually reinforces my point, because the motivator is the credential, or some creditable skillset. This is the economic utility motivator I was referring to, rather than a more abstract education in philosophy or other arts. The skills gained from these more abstract educations are not as highly valued by their economic potential, however they could actually be more beneficial to both the person and society as a whole.