Reasonable: "Let's therefore reduce the cost of education."
Stupid: "Let's stop educating people."
It's very obvious to me that today's problems are overwhelmingly technological, biological, mathematical, scientific, industrial etc. Even within these subjects, there's a mismatch between the concrete problems seen in industrial practice and the abstract and simplified ones seen in academia.
I hear the 'but any degree will give you a well rounded perspective' kind of hand wavy arguments, but these are presented without evidence, and are unfalsifiable 'runaway arguments' that have no finish line - at what point do you stop and say we're pouring resources into the wrong areas and neglecting others?
The explosion of mental health problems in the world and economic dysfunction are not STEM problems, and any solutions likely have their share of public policy as well as making life more enriching. Especially since it's smartphones and social media (technology), aided by the best psychologists money could buy to create addictive algorithms, that hold a good share of the blame for those mental health epidemics. With the rise of the sports betting industry in the US I can only see the financial problems for everyday people getting worse, but I'm sure that the masterminds behind it will blame individual people for not being stronger in willpower than their algorithms are at being engaging. Are we going to technology our way out of that, or are we going to be more mindful about how technology is used?
where one set of eyes sees higher education as unnecessary due to “low ROI”, another set of eyes may wonder if/how/why the cost of higher education has outpaced salaries of those whom it’s supposed to have served.
my sense (and its all intuition and not information based) is that we’ve had about 2 decades of rapidly increasing educational costs while support funding (grants, scholarships, state subsidization) has remained stagnant (or decreased), and incomes of graduates have not increased at the same rate relative to the cost of acquiring that degree.
these trendlines would be pretty informative if someone created them. then we could ask why …