The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do.

Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.

When education becomes universally accessible, we don't get equality; we just get higher hurdles. Just look at the dev industry. It used to be that knowing a local CMS was enough to get a job. Now, you are forced to grind leetcode and memorize the deep architecture of tech stacks you'll never actually use just to pass the filtering process.

I don't think there's any real solution to this inequality. It's a reality, and any attempt to 'solve' it is bound to fail