63% of Americans Polled say Four-Year College Degrees Aren't Worth the Cost (nbcnews.com)
- Reference: 0180237171
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/29/080250/63-of-americans-polled-say-four-year-college-degrees-arent-worth-the-cost
- Source link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic-shift-americans-no-longer-see-four-year-college-degrees-rcna243672
> Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is "worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime," while 63% agree more with the concept that it's "not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off." In 2017, U.S. adults surveyed were virtually split on the question — 49% said a degree was worth the cost and 47% said it wasn't. When CNBC asked the same question in 2013 as part of its All American Economic Survey, 53% said a degree was worth it and 40% said it was not. The eye-popping shift over the last 12 years comes against the backdrop of several major trends shaping the job market and the education world, from exploding college tuition prices to rapid changes in the modern economy — which seems once again poised for radical transformation alongside advances in AI...
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> Remarkably, less than half of voters with college degrees see those degrees as worth the cost: 46% now, down from 63% in 2013... The upshot is that interest in technical, vocational and two-year degree programs has soared.
"The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected [2]across virtually every demographic group ."
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-dramatic-shift-americans-no-longer-see-four-year-college-degrees-rcna243672
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26310998-nbc-news-october-2025-poll/
Wrong question. (Score:4, Informative)
The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.
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Very few degrees are actually useful and the people who take those would often be better off getting a job first and then deciding that, say, they need a degree in engineering to progress further in that job than paying to get the degree up front and then discovering there are no jobs (as a friend of ours recently has). The whole degree system has been turning into a huge scam where kids borrow vast sums of money to keep pampered academics in nice jobs.
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Bingo. Signing 18-year-old kids up to be debt slaves is immoral.
One look at the insane salaries and gigantic construction projects at many universities tells you everything you need to know.
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I'm an academic.
I've got a good thing going here, and if you don't keep the lid on it, I might have to get a real job! I make at least half of my living emailing office hours to students, since I have a bad habit of putting them at the top of the syllabus that no one reads. Granted, it was hard work deciding which $100 textbook to make my students buy so I could read my free publisher copy to them verbatim, but that was a one-time adoption activity. And then there's that committee that meets in the printer
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> t is exceedingly rare to see any serious advancement at the fundamental level come from someone without extensive education.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Dylan Field, Evan Williams, Gabe Newell, Jay Koum, Larry Fucking Ellison, Zuck, Michael Dell, and Travis Kalanick are all dropouts to name just a few. I personally know a couple of dropouts with patents you've probably heard of. I myself am a dropout (EE, 1 year) who pioneered in two industries. Chances are strong you have been affected by my work over the last 25 years.
> There are non-degreed "skilled workers" who might take a wrench to an airplane without a degree, but you'll be hard pressed to find someone designing an airplane without a degree.
Igor Sikorsky, the father of the helicopter, was a dropout. Jack Northrop never went to college, though he later fo
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Investment is a tricky one.
I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.
The actual specifics tend to be less important
Re: Wrong question. (Score:2)
No reason for the degree to move up. The job could simply provide the necessary training. The whole system is predicated on jobs relying on 3rd parties to train (be it another company or a college). Either way it's a shit system that companies like to scam.
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My dad used to work as a repair technician. On more than one occasion, he had enough work to take on an apprentice. Invariably, they'd quit as soon as they got useful to start their own business.
Under the current system, an employer is relieved of the cost of educating the employee (and the risks that go with it) with the trade-off that they pay for the tuition via the employee salary schedule itself. Thus, a college educated worker commands a "higher salary" that covers the upfront education cost. If we sw
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It really depends. As degrees in the US are a big business, there are many worthless degrees and many that you can get easily, making them worthless if you did it the easy way.
Funny thing. The largest private (i.e. for profit) University in Germany currently has problems because many students find the degrees are not valuable and they do not learn a lot. No such problems with the regular ones. I think commercial education is just broken because of perverted incentives.
Well, duh (Score:1)
This is what happens when people see a generation of kids borrowing lots of money to get a 'good degree' and then ending up struggling to find a job in
And elite overproduction is a common sign of a society that's approaching collapse. Those kids believe--quite rightly given what they were told--that they deserve a much better life than they will have and won't be very happy with the existing elite telling them to retrain in making burgers.
really need to have the banks and schools take loa (Score:3)
really need to have the banks and schools take loan risk then you will costs come down.
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Yes. Every loan should have to be co-signed by the school because they're the ones saying it will benefit the kids.
If Trump had any sense he would forgive all student loans and pay them off with a windfall tax on the schools who've been raking in the money from the loans. They know they're selling a defective product and shouldn't be treated any differently to any other business that's doing so.
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Informative)
Other countries realize that free/inexpensive higher education is actually an investment in their citizens and in their country's futures.
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They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.
The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or ge
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Getting a degree does not absolve you from really learning and being good at things. I think a significant pert of the people with degrees that have trouble finding jobs did select "easy" ones or took it wayyyy to easy getting them. Commercial "education" will make that easy, but you waste your time and money that way.
Not worth it *now* (Score:3)
> say that a four-year college degree isn't worth the cost
"[...] say that a four-year college degree isn't worth its current cost now [...]
as indicated later:
> exploding college tuition prices
Re:Not worth it *now* (Score:5, Informative)
As mentioned above, other countries realize that free/inexpensive higher education is actually an investment in their citizens and in their country's futures.
But i the grand tradition of the American “free market,” the U.S. once again proves that if there’s a way to squeeze its own citizens for profit, it’ll find it.
Other countries invest in people; we just invoice them and call it freedom, leaving generations shackled to long-term debt.
Re: Not worth it *now* (Score:2)
Indeed. It's a sad shameful situation.
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> Other countries invest in people; we just invoice them and call it freedom, leaving generations shackled to long-term debt.
Exactly this - whatever improvements in income they might get from their college degree will be offset by the long-term debt they get in for that degree.
Tautology (Score:5, Informative)
Roughly the same percentage of people who lack a 4-year college degree says a 4-year college degree isn't worth the cost.
Everyone knows a college education has gotten ridiculously expensive, which will naturally sway those without a college degree to not regret having pursued one, even though a college degree remains the best, most flexible option for those who can cut it.
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It is dishonest of you to leave this part out:
> Remarkably, less[sic] than half of voters with college degrees see those degrees as worth the cost: 46% now, down from 63% in 2013.
And how many of those have one? (Score:3)
Because people without degrees are often just envious.
I routinely ask my part-time students why they chose to get that degree after all. It is "need more skills for my job", "no career options without that degree" and sometimes "I really want to know more about things". This mostly students that are interested in IT security though, no idea how representative that is.
It's the long game (Score:2)
First, your goal going to college should be to learn _way_ more than you did ever in high school. Most people find it's where your real learning begins. It's a time to grow, experiment, and dream big. For many, it's also a time to take all the required courses necessary to do what are considered professional jobs - engineering, science, math, medicine, the list goes on.
Secondly, you've eliminated the 4 year degree barrier which is still actively deployed nation-wide by companies for jobs which otherwise h
"Americans" and "cost" doing a lot of lifting (Score:2)
Be interested to see the perception in other countries with different payment systems. If the cost was 1/3 the current rate all else equal does this polling move? I imagine it does.
It's much like healthcare in that despite all the evidence out in the world Americans treat these systems as intractable laws of nature, the costs are sky high because that's how they are and always have to be. Meanwhile it's just basic economics that tells you why the costs keep going up and yet we take the route of "we tried
Not everybody needs to go to college. (Score:1)
The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational
An important aspect (Score:3)
There's a lot more to college than just the academics. College is where you meet the friends you'll keep for life, and often your future spouse. Going from dormland to a shared house with friends as roommates is a gentle transition from living at home to being on your own. The social interaction isn't the bullshit of high school; this is where people start to develop the social skills of adults. At college you choose who you spend most of your time with. When working you spend time with the people your boss hired, like them or not. I think the experience of going to college is important for growth and wellness. And it's hell of a lot of fun too.
Re: An important aspect (Score:2)
Lies. It's stupid and a waste of time. I know from experience.
Re: An important aspect (Score:2)
So you didnt learn in college that people can have different experiences?
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It's interesting that when pushed the degree-mongers always come back to 'well, a degree isn't training you to do a job, it's teaching you to think and, uh, you have fun and shit.'
And you're going to pay $100,000+ for that? For $100,000 you could travel the world for years and meet a whole lot of interesting people and do a whole lot of interesting things.
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"College is where you meet the friends you'll keep for life,"
That certainly didn't work. We went poof in multiple different directions. Never saw any of them again.
Asking ignorant people hard questions. Again. (Score:1)
Brexit should have taught the world that asking people who don't know much about something for their views on the usefulness of that something is a BAD idea.
And here it is even worse because the question is meaningless:
- A 4 year degree in Physics might well be worth it and lead to improvements in our world
- A 4 year degree in a social "science" might be an utter waste of time and lead to spending your life doing pointless polling and arguing that the results mean things they clearly do not.
Too broad a question (Score:3)
As summarized, this is a poor question. There's a world of difference between a PhD in medieval poetry, paying full freight at an Ivy versus BS in machine learning from State.
There's also a ton of difference from person to person. My master's definitely paid for itself. My nephew dropped out of a state college because he had no interest or aptitude for education. A college degree would be wasted on him as long as his career goal is professional gamer.
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> professional gamer.
But he keeps falling for that gift horse statue left on the front lawn.
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Not to mention the classic chemical engineering vs gender studies argument.
That said, was I really better off as an engineer than I would been as an electrician? I put in a lot of unpaid overtime that would have been time and a half.
For that matter the senior board operators at the chemical plant made more than I did, but they worked rotating shifts too.
Why current college sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
1) How many credit hours will be taught by tenured faculty vs $1000-per-credit-hour adjuncts?
2) Faculty don't want to administer their departments (or other departments), so they outsource to non-educators. Work-study? Graduate students? Nope. Bureaucrats can't build private empires with students.
3) Most textbooks are over-priced rip-offs. Most undergraduate classes don't teach cutting edge, so older text books are fine.
4) Graduate school is a special form of hell (eg [1]https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/... [acoup.blog]).
5) Universities don't eat their own food. New logo? Use the Fine Arts department? Hell no, we're spending money on Madison Avenue. New Building? Use Architecture department? Surely you jest!
6) The university president isn't an educator, but chosen on fund-raising ability.
7) The faculty and staff dream of a multi-billion dollar endowment, like Harvard (see 6). The idea is that they can do whatever they want, college market be damned.
8) Very few athletic departments make money. Now I'm prepared to call the net expense "advertising". But how many (additional) applications is the college receiving for this "advertising".
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/
63%? (Score:2)
Big deal. That's only one out of four.
"I Love the uneducated" (Score:2)
(The Great Leader)
Investment in future discrimination in your favor (Score:2)
So people with degrees have opinions on their value? Yeah, please fuck off. My degree got me out of the poverty I was born into. Most degrees are pointless, but what doors did you think a history degree would open up? Look...folks can say whatever the fuck they want, but their behavior is what matters. Did I learn anything relevant to my career? Nope, not one thing.
However, many hiring managers called me and ignored some guy with no degree who was equally qualified, especially when starting out.
They are objectively wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Even in the current environment they are objectively wrong. All the study proves is that propaganda works.
The ruling elite has decided they do not want you to be educated. They have spent a lot of money to convince you that you do not need to be educated.
You can tell they're lying because they don't tell their kids to go become plumbers. They send them to very expensive schools with a lot of humanities courses so that they can be taught critical thinking
I know tech nerds don't like the humanities but when you are dealing with someone who does not automatically think critically about information that is how you teach them to do it. This is why you will always find lots of humanities classes at expensive schools.
Re:They are objectively wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
They send their kids to expensive schools to network with the other kids of the elite.
This is kind of obvious because a lot of the kids coming out of those expensive schools are neither very smart nor very educated.
Re:They are objectively wrong (Score:5, Informative)
They'll do just fine on the Hill, the House, and the Street tho. In fact, only their kind will do.
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Exactly. They'll be given a high-level job where they just have to do what they're told... which requires neither intelligence or education.
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That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.
This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.
Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.
Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that mana
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> That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.
Yet you're the one who speaks favorably about shoplifting.
> This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.
Which you failed to do when you talked your "kid" into spending huge sums of money that he never even had for a degree that's basically worthless, and will pay for it for the rest of his life.
> Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.
[1]https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
> Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that manages to get through that system but when it happens and they get caught they go to jail for decades.
So what does that say about you, given you're even less intelligent than they are?
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/populism
Re:They are objectively wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Truth. Ever notice how every single one of the politico's who've been railing against "elitists" and who continually warn us against the dangers of "liberal" colleges all have their own advanced degrees?
Trump graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and from the Wharton School of Business. Marco Rubio graduated from the University of Florida and the University of Miami Law School. Jeb Bush? University of Texas. Rand Paul? Baylor and Duke. Tom Cotton attended Harvard and Harvard Law, and Ted Cruz hails from Princeton and Harvard. JD Vance? OSU and Yale.
But you? Nah. Can't have the common folk bein' "overcredentialed". Might start gettin' uppity and askin' too many questions.
Best to leave all that higher learnin' to our new ruling class and be properly thankful for any table scraps they toss our way...
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Things have changed since they were there, duh. Things have completely changed in the 40 years since I first went off to college, too.
Re:They are objectively wrong (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't new. Regan reduced funding to the University of California system and raised tuition in the latter half of the 60s, at least partly in reponse to protests against the war in Vietnam. See [1]https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educated-proletariat-created-the-student-debt-crisis/ [bestcolleges.com].
One of his advisers later said, "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat... We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education)."
[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educated-proletariat-created-the-student-debt-crisis/
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> Trump graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and from the Wharton School of Business. Marco Rubio graduated from the University of Florida and the University of Miami Law School. Jeb Bush? University of Texas. Rand Paul? Baylor and Duke. Tom Cotton attended Harvard and Harvard Law, and Ted Cruz hails from Princeton and Harvard. JD Vance? OSU and Yale.
> But you? Nah. Can't have the common folk bein' "overcredentialed". Might start gettin' uppity and askin' too many questions.
Is this about Trump, Rubio, Bush, Paul, Cotton, Cruz, and Vance all saying that people should stop going to college?
Even the summary says
> "The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected across virtually every demographic group ."
How you got from "cross-demographic survey results" to "conspiracy of all republicans" seems a bit of a leap. If the Republicans *actually have* found a way to exert that much influence on the views of every demographic group, the Democrats might as well just pack their bags and go home, they're done forever.
I think in reality this is just a survey detecting people notici
Re: They are objectively wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
You both are wrong. The question is whether it's worth the cost. There's no question or concern over political crap like rsilvergun thinks there is. The question is more: Do you get what you pay for?
And to me, this isn't a simple yes or no answer. The answer I'd give is: What degree did you get, and what did you pay for it? No matter what degree you have, I'd say that if you spent more than $150k, under any circumstance, then you got ripped off. Period.
rsilvergun keeps whining that his imaginary "kid" borrowed $300,000. There is no rhyme or reason to spend that much for any degree, let alone one that has nearly zero chance of ever paying that off within his lifetime. And worse, he blames that on, of all things, republicans, even though the government has been keeping up with inflation when it comes to pell grants and other funding.
And at the same time, he holds blameless the very institutions who have been raising their tuition rates at several times the rate of inflation for decades, and then conned his dumb as into believing that he needs this really bad, even though he really didn't. Or at the very least, he could have done far better by going to community college first, then going to a public in-state university, where borrowing may not even be necessary at all. But at the end of the day, we live in a free society, which also includes being free to make one incredibly bad life decision right after the other.
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I do not think it is that simple. It is more than propaganda. I have a few master degrees. (don't ask) I started at the same salary as my brother in law, though. He went to a technical school, did a year specialization in HVAC and went to work straight away.
Reason? Too few good technically skilled people these days, especially in HVAC. Way too many people with a master degree.
If my brother in law does not want to do overtime, he flips his finger to his boss and goes home. I have not yet tried that, but
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The national average wage of an HVAC technician in the USA is about $29/hr. Pretty hard to raise a family on that pay.
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Just below high school teachers, which requires a 4-year degree plus postgraduate schooling.
Just a little less than paralegals, more than credit counselors, a little less than meeting/convention/event planners, the same as tax examiners/collectors & revenue agents, 20%+ more than EMTs and paramedics, slightly less than surgical assistants ... most of which require 4-year degrees too.
Someone working at that median HVAC job who was married to someone working part-time is going to be a member of an a
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Perhaps if you work for someone. I've had several things done over the past few years. A water heater for 3500, probably cost 600, so around 3 grand for 3 man hours of labor. The guy worked as a contractor. I asked him if he ever moonlit, as I thought he did good work and would want to bypass the corporate take if he could. He was completely uninterested. Completely. I think he was making very good buck as he had his own tools including a cool little device to crimp copper fittings. I also had a new AC put
Re: They are objectively wrong (Score:2)
You're conflating education with vocational training.
A master's degree isn't for earning money, it's for shaping your intellect.
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The ruling elite have the money to send their kids to college without it causing them or their kids any financial damage, duh.
Odds are that Joe Sixpack's kids will become debt slaves due to ridiculous college costs, by contrast, and they would be financially better off buying a house with the same money.
As it happens, a friend of mine who is a wealthy Stanford alum has two sons: one is currently at Stanford, and his older brother is apprenticing with a plumber after dropping out of a good college due
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> So much for your uninformed opinion.
"According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median annual wage for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters was $60,090 as of May 2023. That translates to about $28.89 per hour."
[1]https://plumbingtipstoday.com/... [plumbingtipstoday.com]
[1] https://plumbingtipstoday.com/average-salary-of-a-plumber-in-the-us/
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How does that in any way refute what I said? You think my rich friend and his Ivy-League educated wife don't know this?
But you quote a secondary source when the primary is a click away: [1]BLS 2024 figures. [bls.gov]. Wages are up by 4.9% in just one year! And guess what else? There are actual plumbing jobs available. You practically live on Slashdot, so you can't be unaware of the current bloodbath in tech jobs--to name just one formerly good industry.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm
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It's not a problem to go to college if you can afford the cost. I don't think anyone is saying it's of no value - it's just starting to not be worth the cost for people who have to take out a large amount of debt. Taking an honest look at cost/reward of college for your own personal circumstance sounds like embracing critical thinking to me. It's not shying away from it. Also, I've also met too many people who are great critical thinkers who didn't go to college to believe that the current higher educationa
Re:They are objectively wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
MA has free community college, funded by a rich tax. If only more states did something similar.
You are doing a classic mistake. (Score:2)
Conflating education with academic rank.
Both are not the same. A detail politics likes to ignore because that enables noise-making.
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Indeed. People with a good education have _options_. And that means they do not have to take crap. Obviously, quite a few assholes do not like to have that type of person around.
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> People with a good education have _options_. And that means they do not have to take crap.
Definitely the dumbest thing I will read all day, congratulations!
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Well, I can see that you never made that experience. I have.
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I have very little formal education, yet I have taken almost zero shit for most of my working life.
I have worked around tons of heavily degreed people who look trapped and take all kinds of shit.
You ascribe to education what ought to be ascribed to character.
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> They send them to very expensive schools with a lot of humanities courses so that they can be taught critical thinking
You misunderstand what powerful people sending kids into top schools are doing. It is not about getting education but about getting connections. It is almost entirely about other people that go to the same school that allows one to form critical connections that important in business and politics. For a regular person going to a regular school this is almost entirely not applicable.
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It's a borderline scam, where so many jobs, even minimum wage ones, need a degree just to get past the application submission stage, that a degree is almost mandatory in many fields. A lot of it is employers transferring the cost of training to the employee.
It also blows the meritocracy arguments out of the water, because a person's ability to get high level qualifications is highly dependent on their ability to pay. Not just pay for college, but to not work so much they don't have time to do extra studying