Education is meant to prepare you to think and live, not just prepare you to work. I’m glad I didn’t drop out in my first year to chase the Silicon Valley dream, because I’d be a much more manipulable, less capable individual if I did.
Colleges need to cost less. Much less.
And they need to return to free inquiry with more education, and less administration and propaganda and fake studies low effort departments.
Then what you say will be much more true and we will be in a better place.
Conservatives have waged a targeted attack on US education by shifting the federal and state tax burden to students. This began with Ronald Reagan and ended with the Koch network. Conservatives intentionally did this because they believe the traditional academic system in the US produces liberals and democrats. By shifting the tax burden to students, they have disincentivized free inquiry at the local level and supplanted it with corporate-sponsored job training which promotes hard right wing political and societal values.
Here is the supporting evidence:
What? Do you mean college used to be paid for by taxes and now students have to pay for it and that's why college is so expensive? If not what exactly does that mean?
A link to a collection of ideological ramblings and one sided opinions isn't really "evidence" in any meaningful sense of the word. I could no doubt find a similar collection of faith based screeds that cherry pick facts in support of the conclusion that "Liberals have caused all this!" but it wouldn't be worth all that much.
We really need to move back into rational inquiry instead of ideological holy wars to solve the problems we collectively face in my opinion. And not just with education either.
That’s exactly what it means. Not sure why you think this is an opinion. It’s a demonstrable, historical fact based on solid evidence. I provided reliable sources in my initial comment which you waved away and dismissed out of hand. Tax cuts for the rich, supported by deep cuts to educational budgets, led to increases in the cost of education for everyone else. This isn’t seriously disputed by anyone. It was Koch’s published strategy circa 1980, it was subsequently embraced by Reagan conservatives for that decade, and is now enshrined by conservatives as standard operating procedure. There are literally hundreds of academic sources supporting this fact. Conservatives don’t want to pay for public education because they believe it produces liberals and democrats, and they aren’t entirely wrong, in the sense that education does have a liberalizing influence on society. The problem is that public opinion (also known as democracy) is against conservatives, as the public overwhelmingly supports funding education and lowering the cost for everyone. Conservatives are aware of this, which is why they are passing anti-democratic legislation in as many states as they can. None of what I’ve written here is controversial in any way. This is what is occurring.
The current trend to water down what is available so that everyone can check the 12 year box regardless of effort or interest is a terrible waste.