Do you getting a college education is a good thing?

submitted by 8thmonitor from self.whatever

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Countach_3D 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The traditional question is:

If you had to pick between the degree, or the knowledge you gained while earning it, which would you choose?

I suspect for most grads nowadays, it's the degree.

But if you want a pay bump go to a vocational school, not university.

A true well-rounded liberal arts education makes you a fuller person, a better citizen, Socrates' examined life and all that. I'm aware that degree inflation has made a university education a prerequisite for many white-collar jobs, but the skills learned are tangential at best to most office work and in an ideal world university would be available to all who are willing and able to broaden their perspective on the world, without forcing others who feel like they need to be there just to earn a dignified living.

[–]Countach_3D 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

And you are correct that we can't all be plumbers and carpenters, but there is nothing inherent to those positions that makes them capable of supporting a family (and they would be just as subject to falling wages if suddenly a flood of new plumbers were trained.)

Thinking of construction or manufacturing as "well-paying jobs" is a category error. Those jobs pay (paid) well because over the course of half a century workers collectively insisted on better compensation (i.e. a larger share of the profits they generate). When the economy shifted and fewer of those jobs were necessary, the jobs that replaced them hadn't undergone the same decades-long process of securing dignified working conditions.

If by "the disastrous effects of globalism" you mean free trade it's pretty difficult to predict which industries will be resistant to the shifting sands of hypercapitalism. Pretty much any knowledge work can be done by AI, or at least by any English speaker in a poor country with an Internet connexion, but the stuff that's "nailed down" (plumbers, manicurists, mechanics) can be undercut by movement of labour from poorer countries too.

The most in-demand position and one of the hardest to automate is medical caregivers but, again, since the workers aren't organized wages remain low.