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CM30

Eh, even most normal colleges are pretty honest in their ads compared to game design ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAFLfx3mvIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWvfMLl4ho

But seriously, the fact of the matter is:

1. Too many people go to college, so its original value (as a status indicator) is now virtually non existent

2. It's too expensive, so unless a good job is a near guaranteed outcome, people will laden with debt after going.

3. Most people and most jobs don't need college, and the push to send everyone to college has led to rampant degree inflation in terms of academic requirements.

The only solution to fix that would be to somehow get employers to stop caring about degrees, to make it less 'necessary' for many people, and to encourage less people to attend for the career 'boost'.

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> "Too many people go to college"

This is complete claptrap, would you also say "Too many people go to secondary school"? How about "Too many people go to elementary"?

There is vast value in an educated workforce and "too many" is a nonsense reason for why university level education shouldn't be available for all.

The second part of the statement clarified intent. It's not a moral judgement, it's conditional failure to fulfill the purpose of differentiation.

If education was the main motivation for college rather then trying to prove to employers you are a more competitive employee then your peers, I feel the system would look a lot different and not have nearly the same balooning cost problem.

That sounds good in writing, but it doesn’t seem to work in real life for some reason.

Two of the cities I’ve lived in have been places with several large businesses focused on a single non-factory industry. They could never get enough workers, so demand for labor was high and because of that so were wages.

The prevailing attitude among the very local teens (2nd generation plus) was “Why should I go to college when I can make $xx/hour working in the industry?”

Their parents also worked in the industry and thus didn’t push their children to go to college.

The mentality is so pervasive that at a community event I saw an industry table set up with a big banner reading “Why you don’t need college,” and nobody else thought that was odd.

The result is that most of the locals are pretty dumb. They make poor decisions in their personal lives, which has an impact on the entire city, it’s policing policies and it’s healthcare system.

Non-industry businesses are reluctant to move to those cities because they can’t find educated workers, so the economy can’t diversify.

I saw a tech startup hiring people straight out of high school simply because that’s all it could find. Not surprisingly, the company failed in under a year.

It’s a shame that college is so expensive, and there should be a way to fix that. But in my experience, employers wanting degrees helps society ad a whole because it encourages more people to seek higher education who would otherwise be complacent.

> The result is that most of the locals are pretty dumb.

It is concerning to me that after approximately 18 years on earth and 12 years of schooling that the locals are still dumb. But as little as two to four more years of school can transform them into smart, well rounded, people capable of understanding complex social issues related to their city and beyond.

It seems the real shame is not that college is expensive, but that we've wasted the time of our youngsters.

american high schools aren't proper schools in the sense that they educate their students for life ahead, they're day care. they encourage rote memorization and regurgitation of data instead of critical thinking and processing of the world around us. if you memorize and regurgitate to a passable standard (which is set quite low, at least in the rural public school i attended) they shake your hand and send you out on your way.

i think proper college reform needs to start lower, and make proper adults out of our high school grads instead of requiring four years of paid-for university to accomplish that. unfortunately, i'm no expert and i don't have the foggiest idea where you'd start with that.

While this is anecdotally common, I can't say it's universal.

Where I went to school we were taught to think. I didn't appreciate it fully at the time, but I do now.

We were taught that knowing things is great, but it's equially important to know why things are the way they are. To this end, we had a lot of classes in history, geography, philosophy (a little) and civics.

Even in elementary school, we went through endless drills called "Fact or opinion" where we were presented with everything from single sentences to headlines to paragraphs, and learned all about weasel words and hidden meanings in the English language. At the time I hated it, and it was one of many things I never thought I'd ever need as an adult.

Today the schools need to teach that more than ever, but I doubt any still do. Even the ones I went to.

It seems the real shame is not that college is expensive, but that we've wasted the time of our youngsters.

I can't disagree with this. It's been a problem for a very long time.

When I first went to college many moons ago, even back then there were classes for the incoming students who needed to be brought up to college level. These classes were always full.

It always seemed to me that community colleges should fill that gap. Back then, community colleges were considered a joke and just a glorified vocational school. If that's changed, I'm glad. But I feel like if more money and effort were put into community colleges they could shed that stigma and provide a usable college education for everyone.

I was at an education conference a couple of years ago, and according to the speakers there, what's happening behind the scenes is the seeds are being planted at a high level to make community college a guaranteed (free) right in America, the way elementary and high school is. The reasoning is that back when K-12 was established as the norm, that was the normal education one needed to get by in life. Now a two-year degree is the minimum, and the government should step up and add that as well.

Naturally, the problem is always paying for it. But there were some people positing that more educated people get higher-paying jobs and pay more taxes, and somehow it will all work out that way.

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