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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

Debt as an investment is fine. If you are investing in your future with your education, okay, but that requires the education be practical. It must have a value greater than its cost. That is not true for most education and thus we are not investing in our future as a society with this debt.

I'd rather the debt we incur as a society be spent on infrastructure and engineers than wicker baskets. Wicker baskets don't last very long. Roads and bridges do. Engineers do.

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Sure, but once you bring financial value into the equation it starts limiting access. Not everyone can be an engineering major. Not everyone even belongs at college in the first place. But we as a society want everyone who wants to go to college to be able to afford it (at least initially). That is not compatible with a profit minded view of that education being a sound financial investment for each individual student.

This doesn't mesh with my perspective of education. Universities are non-profits for a reason. yes, there are profit minded University of Phoenix's but that is not the historical norm and they are the worst offenders.

Not everyone should go to college. We shouldn't enable everyone to go to college. If you shouldn't go to college, going to college won't change that. You'll struggle and fail out or get a worthless degree because it's the only one you can pass enough classes to get.

We have trade schools. We have apprenticeships and on the job training. Lots of folks for home those paths are better, are turned off to them by social pressure, not logic. I've taken welding classes and vehicle maintenance classes and they have shown themselves to be valuable assets to me. I can connect steel at the atomic level. I can keep my vehicles safe for me and my family and friends.

There's no one-size-fits all approach to human evolution and we need all of us. Maybe I'm idealistic.

We need to stop doing stuff that only makes sense to the banks. They are entirely self-interested and provide negative value back to society. We are squandering our futures to the fat cats.

Okay - can anyone actually cite me even a class, let alone a degree, that has the word wicker baskets in them? If not, stop using this straw-man term.

Dude it is a satirical term to symbolize low value programs. It isn’t supposed to be taken literally.

Teachers generate less value (see:income, GDP) than engineers.

We should abolish teaching degrees and just teach software engineering at college.

We probably should. I bet it's easier to teach a STEM grad how to teach (in a professional training program after college) than to teach a professional 'teacher' how to do math.

What are you basing that on?

My sister is a 3rd-grade teacher and I'm not sure I would be equipped to handle 30 children without lots of training. Teaching someone how to teach 3rd-grade math is not that difficult. Teaching someone to start building positive learning habits with 8-9-year-olds sounds incredibly complicated.

I might be reading into your post too much but it seems like you think STEM grads are superior to non-stem grads. I don't buy that. STEM grads have a specialty that is in demand in the labor market. It doesn't make STEM grads better then non-STEM grads.

You may be right about elementary school teachers, I'm thinking more about high school STEM teachers specifically. Although the grade school teachers in my city seem to struggle even with fractions [0].

Only one of my high school math teachers seemed to have any idea what math was about (not just regurgitating formulas, but deriving them and proving them from a set of axioms and only then using those formulas to solve free-form real-world problems).

My High School CS teacher was a geography teacher who just read one chapter ahead in the CS textbook and had no idea what he was talking about.

Being good at teaching seems kind of useless when you don't know anything to teach.

[0] https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2016/05/13/for...

Well, the real question is marginal value - if we taught more software engineers, they might not bring in much income or create much GDP.

If you're asserting that teachers are as valuable as software engineers to society, then the question becomes: why doesn't society compensate them accordingly?

Given the hard core attempt to subvert eduction going on in the public schools, maybe. At least with software you’ll have logic, math, and history. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/dqd6ca/activist...

You should take a moment and read that individuals post. It is well researched. Just because it’s from r/conspiracy doesn’t mean you should skip it.

It’s a metaphor for a degree that does not generate an income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_basket_weaving

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