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> It will tear the child to shreds in adulthood once they realize what happened, but that doesn't seem to matter to most wealthy parents.

Will it? I grew up around a lot of rich kids, and know a lot of people in Ivy League schools. They generally weren't the smartest kids (those tended to end up at the #1 research universities in the world for the depts/broader areas they were interested in), and yet even now that we're pushing 30, they tend on average to think that the system works quite well.

The thought of #1 research universities crowded with rich dummies just disappoints me. Imagine what research could be accomplished if the universities were populated by smart people instead.

This is how I feel about college athletics. Make a minor league and pay the players, don't spend millions of govt/tuition dollars on coach salaries that could be spent on education and research.

This is how baseball works and it seems to be fine.

College baseball does exist, but it's not a de-facto minor professional league like college basketball and football are. Even the lowest level of the professional minor league system is stronger than college baseball, and it's perfectly normal for strong enough players to be drafted directly from high school into the professional minors.

As long as the athletic department breaks even or turns a profit, I don't have an issue with the coach salaries. According to this article, only about 1/4 of schools are running at a loss. That seems lower than expected though.

https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

Doesn't change how unfair the system is for the players (specifically of men's football and basketball), who are prevented from earning a fair wage by the bizarre rule against paying them.

And since NCAA is a cartel, they can't sell their labor on the free market without moving abroad...

Well, the good news is that the graduate students and postdocs who actually do the research are sourced in a much more meritocratic way. Academia definitely has its politics and inefficiencies, but almost everyone wants to be there and do good work, and top universities have solid systems for attracting and identifying real talent.

Of course, the quality of undergraduates has some effect on morale among the researchers - one imagines that the professor and graduate students teaching a course colloquially called "Stars for Stoners" must be wholehearted evangelists and/or be dying inside a bit every year. But this is largely isolated from the research itself, and you'll always find diamonds in the rough - undergraduates who are truly passionate and capable at a graduate level. They do great work.

If anything, the parent post may be referring to students who come from "feeder schools" which provide tremendous amounts of preparation and everything-on-the-legal-side-of-this-entire-controversy. And though those students are slightly more likely to be immature when they first matriculate, they too end up finding their passions and work ethics, and making great contributions of their own. Sure, the very same resources that let them enter those feeder schools tend to help them when they graduate. But if anything, it's good that the university can now count them as alumni, and that they can help their fellow graduates with networking and continuity of the collegiate experience. Research universities are a well-balanced system, and though there are many reforms that can be done, the systems as a whole work well.

I think the poster you replied to was saying the opposite: that (a) he grew up around rich kids, and, separately, (b) knows people who went to top research universities.

Both groups think the system "works quite well".

No I was saying that the smartest kids I knew ended up in the research universities (with a couple of exceptions). The ones a step down were usually the ones at the Ivies. The quality of an education at a research university far outstrips their reputations (particularly if you're optimizing for departments), while a big chunk of the value of Ivies is the reputation.

Ivy admissions criteria make a lot more sense if you realize that they're engineering the makeup of the anointed upper-crust of the next generation (which only the most naive idealist would think is tightly related to merit). Tech is an unusually meritocratic industry (for now), which is why, at least in my experience, the brand power of the educational institutions on your resume aren't that great a predictor of success in the industry.

Ivies are research universities... Princeton and Harvard in particular are some of the best research institutions in the world.

Sure, the two groups aren't mutually exclusive. When I said that the smarter people I knew generally picked schools based on the strength of the depts they had some interest in, that included a couple of people who went to Ivy Leagues for those reasons. But most of the people I know who went to Ivies had no more complex a decision process than "it's an Ivy League school". Not coincidentally, ten years later, none of the people in this latter camp are doing anything particularly interesting with their lives or careers.

I get that it sounds like my sample is skewed heavily towards tech,but I can only think of one or two people out of my high school friends/acquaintances who went into tech, so this particular sample isn't skewed that way

One problem with lifelong learning via formal institutions is that the less well off are “tapped out” already with debt and expenses while those with good careers (enough to save for an n-year break) face an enormous opportunity cost, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There are lots of people who would love to go back to college already and learn something new but the financial treadmill is running too fast to get off.

More flexible learning options can help with this.

Going back full time always has a huge opertunity cost. But so does front loading education.

Adults often go back for masters degrees which are manageable as it’s less material.

It would definitely need to be offset by subsidies, but maybe that could come in the form of something that people could claim every 5-20 years like a tax return.

It seems like we have a lot of levers to pull to make life easier on people doing things like that; tuition reimbursement, housing/food/course material subsidies, benefits like health care, child care, help with transit, etc.

But I guess you would have to look out for a resurgence of scammy public for-profit institutions.

You can claim educational loans on your tax returns, but only the interest.

> What would be wrong with a cultural tradition of encouraging people to go back to school every decade or two?

This assumes that the main function of college is to acquire skills. But in reality, it is to "stamp" you as a qualified member of the elite by giving you a College Degree.

There is no need to do that twice.

It's only a huge waste of human capital if people are actually building a lot of capital in college. There is a lot of evidence that they are not and that it's mostly a signaling exercise.