EDIT TO ADD: Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Panama, Kenya, Egypt and more [2]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...
[2] https://www.edvisors.com/plan-for-college/money-saving-tips/...
In Poland's case, there are stupendously large numbers of people studying various branches of humanities (literature, psychology, pedagogy, law) which have poor job prospects in our country. After graduating, a lot of these people just work service jobs or emigrate to Western Europe (to work the same crappy jobs there, but for more money). It's an enormous waste of taxpayer's money, which is happening because the the students are spending out of somebody else's pocket.
Meanwhile, the governing parties eviscerated the trade schools, because "we need educated people", "we're entering knowledge economy" etc. The result being, a median plumber making more than a median law graduate.
This leads to an entirely different discussion about whether universities exist to educate the populace or to train future workers.
==The result being, a median plumber making more than a median law graduate.==
Which should entice more people into the trades. Is that happening?
On top of that, the trade schools were criminally neglected over the past 20 years, so it's very possible to go there and not learn much practical skills...
Getting poor pseudo-education is perhaps more harmful than getting no education at all. People with no education are more likely to have some intellectual humility, while the "quarter-intellectuals" that took some low-effort third-rate humanities courses tend to fall victim to Dunning-Kruger more often, and offer simple solutions/explanations to overwhelmingly complex topics.
Are you sure you don't have some sort of bias here? In my experience humanities study involves lots of critical thinking and reasoning.
Wikipedia [1]: "The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element —as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences, yet, unlike the sciences, it has no central discipline. The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, history, human geography, law, politics, religion, and art."
People studying this would seem less likely to rely on simple solutions and fall victim to Dunning-Kruger.
Google ran a test of their employees skills and found that many humanities-based skills are more highly correlated with success than STEM skills [2].
"Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities [2] https://outline.com/TJAaaZ
I've never understood this argument. STEM requires far more critical thinking and reasoning than the humanities. The scientific, medical, and engineering achievements you use every single day stand as mute proof of that.
In the US, there are thousands of community/local/junior colleges where people earn degrees for a fraction of the cost. This can easily be covered by govt if there was political will to do so.
Or companies may shift their workforce into higher-educated countries.
==Community college is junk, go to trade school or into a real profession and stop inflating entry-level job requirements at tax-payer expense.==
The idea that 2 years of post high-school education is "junk" is alarming. What is a "real profession" and who gets to define it? Wouldn't all the new trade school graduates just inflate entry-level job requirements in those fields and decrease wages?
Sometimes community college is worse than junk, it's downright harmful. The most-recommended method in the US to get an engineering degree is to transfer 2 years of core credits from an easy community college to a harder engineeering school. That cheapens the quality of the degree, as the resulting degree is the same. I've done it - physics at engineering school and physics at community college is night and day.
Apart from that, unless you're going to get a teaching certificate or something else in STEM, the resulting degree would not be in demand from private industry if they weren't so commonplace. Those kids would've been better off working for those 4 years or learning a trade. But instead we have people pushing to fund those 4 years completely at taxpayer expense further inflating the problem.
edit: Hell yeah wages in trades would decrease, they need to. Have you not paid a plumber or electrician lately? The guys going into plumbing right out of high school are a lot smarter than the history majors working at Starbucks.
==The guys going into plumbing right out of high school are a lot smarter than the history majors working at Starbucks.==
Based on what criteria? How much money they make today? How much money they make over their career? How happy they are? How much they contribute back to society? Who gets to choose which measure we use?
The thing that I'm worried about is the reaction of these all-inclusive countries once they see a rise in "education arbitrage": get your degree in Germany, then move to the US to pay less taxes (and make more money in case of CS) and optionally move back once you want/have children. On a long time scale that could bleed a country of resources. And I fear they could get the idea of making people stay somehow.
It's not free, it's financed by exorbitantly high tax rates, which in the long-run is arguably more expensive.
You mean like 35% Federal, 15% Payroll, 5-10% state? and then a 9% sales tax?
And then still "needing" to save 15% for retirement, company paying 15% for healthcare?
Seems pretty short sighted to be thinking other places having higher tax rates when the middle class top marginal is approaching 90%.
It's easier to do stuff for cheaper when you just provide less stuff.