The only people to who can afford to go to school to broaden their education without a clear job benefit are those born rich. In other words, the people who used to go to college pre 1970s.
I respectfully disagree.
I've spent an enormous amount of time inside universities (as both a student and employed as an engineer). The vast majority of students have no clear job benefit at the end of their degree.
Most students are studying something with no obvious job correlation. The largest schools at most second/third rung universities in the western world are humanities (which I'm not knocking, but the employment rate for these degrees into related roles is abysmal).
Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
HN is fairly skewed towards tech. The tech-related courses (CS, EE, etc) have great employment prospects, but they're the outlier.
Obviously there's a huge exception for technical college degrees like CS, science, etc which are worth a ton. This applies to degrees in business, liberal arts, etc.
> In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
Grandparent said these people can't afford to go to school; I don't think what you've said contradicts that.
But “job benefit” isn’t exactly the same as “job placement”. I went back to school for improve my own CS fundamentals but not to immediately get a job. And many people do the same (go back to school for a promotion or for a raise).
And since those people exist, comparing job placement rates won’t tell you much since the data isn’t comparable.