Is a college education for everyone?

I really hated the education system when I was in it, my experiences there were partially what sent me to where I am now. I've heard that university is different from high school, but the problem is that education is built on the wrong foundations.

I've learned more than in school from reading myself and enjoyed it much more, so as long as a college education means going to college as it is now then it's not for me.

The Soviet Union produced plenty of social science and humanities majors.

Stop it. Get some help

I know this may surprise you, but most college students don't get everything paid for by their parents. I know I didn't.

College provides people with the opportunity to expand their intellectual horizons and explore subjects at a higher level than they could if they pursued those interests as a hobby in their spare time.

Clearly, not everyone makes the best use of that opportunity, and there are plenty of bad lecturers and courses. That doesn't discredit in general.

In any case, there's an irony in college being derided as a waste of time by NEETsocs who spend their time masturbating to H-games.

the ones who succeed do. my bro is in grad school and i'm working blue collar jobs mostly because they gave him money, a car, a place to sleep and nothing for me. i think i even scored higher on the sat but i don't know.

i dunno, working my way thru college made me despise it even more for some reason. i was taking this philosophy of aesthetics class which i never showed for because i didn't want to waste time commuting in my shitty dilapidating frankly dangerous hand me down vehicle. one day i went thru the effort to show up and the professor had posted a note on the door "sorry, class is cancelled'. i'd driven 30 minutes to get there and he couldn't even send an email.

likewise my analysis professor nearly screamed at me when i asked why he couldn't tell the homework in class instead of forcing us to look it up later on. wtf dude i have two part time jobs.

The point is to learn whatever you want, faggot.

College should be a free service of society. And the REAL waste in education isn't people taking courses that they're interested in, it's people taking courses BECAUSE they think it will make their career better. We have so many people in college and university getting business and arts majors they don't even care about, because they are told it's what's necessary to get a better job.

I'm sorry you've had such a shitty experience. I think that any decent socialist political program would involve reducing barriers to access to college education, like those that you experienced.

You don't need to go to college to become educated, nor will you necessarily receive an education by attending college.

There is not inherent value in it as an institution. Should you find a good university, with good classes, a good department of your studies, good rates, and the like, than good for you. Such places are becoming more and more scarce as of late. If you can't find such a place, or don't have the money, or are interested in a topic which isn't done the service it deserves within our current environment, you should consider other options without cowing to the social norms and the faith of your peers in its infallibility.

You don't need a gym to get fit, either, and there are plenty of terrible gyms, but it would be foolish to deny that they are, on the whole, pretty helpful.

LOL no one thinks arts education is useful, they just think that they're bad at math.
i'm a dropout and it seems to me the real waste lies in forcing people to repeat classes which they did not perform adequately in due to nonacademic reasons. of course the unis make out like a bandit thru this practice; no wonder they're called failure factories.

in texas where i'm from the governor has limited "withdraws" i'm not sure if to limit gov't expenditures or to weed out bad students. the problem of course is that texas is such a backwards RW shithole that any medical/work/home problem will fuck you up for good. they have the highest dropout rate in the country and for good reason.

either need a stipend eg welfare assistance or make the whole thing free. you cannot go to school fulltime for a nontrivial major and still pay your bills. you also cannot graduate with such an obscene amt of debt; it's too much risk for a single person.

the best solution would be to make the government/uni have some skin in the game instead of the other way around. there are ways to choose capable students; once you have them, you can't fail them for trivial reasons. the elite schools work this way to some extent although they have their problems too.

as a fairly bright person i find it very silly that i've spent so long mucking around in the service industry when theoretically i have a lot more to offer. but my country chose trump and clinton because he-who-shall-not-be-named might raise taxes for people who aren't investment bankers.

tl;dr: "personal responsibility" is highly overrated

i've truthfully never used one except when i was working at one and then just to attend yoga classes which i would never pay for.
also gyms are for rich people.

I was good(ish) at math in high school, I just had no interest in pursuing a STEM subject. Arts was seen as an intrinsically valuable and noble pursuit for a very long time. It's only really in the last few decades, with the rise of the Californian Ideology, that arts has become the butt of so many jokes. You're buying into porkie ideology tbh.

Yeah I totally agree. I don't think we have any disagreement here.

At least in my area, regular yoga classes cost more than a gym membership. Great for you if you can stay fit without one but gyms are still undeniably useful.

i used to ride my bike everywhere and this was fine. both seem like a luxury item.

your POV seems terribly bourgeois; you simply cannot have people taking on thousands in debt for a degree they cannot use. were higher education free you might have an argument but the quality of both private and public education in this country is so friggin low i'm not sure why you'd choose to otherwise.

i've been to four unis. the first transfer i was actually hoping for an improvement; i'm not so naive anymore. community college was the best because they were well aware they sucked, that their students were in work, and the professors were appropriately humble. seems that entrance into elite positions is largely a function of background and luck because those that do make it never struck me as particularly smart or effective. i'm referring specifically to professors but doctors are freaking awful too.

Bikes don't really build muscle. They're good for stamina but not so much for acquiring muscle power. Besides, not areas are easily cycleable.

There's nothing bourgeois in stating that a formal education in the humanities is valuable, even if it does provide a financial return. As I think I've made clear already, I am well aware that many people are not in a position to pursue that sort of education, and I find that fact regrettable.

*doesn't provide

blowing thousands of dollars on a questionable financial investment is quite p r i v i l e g e d. i'd agree with you that these things have their value but the more time i spent at a place of work the more i questioned it. maybe answering the deep philosophical questions didn't seem v important anymore or possibly not even relevant to real life at all! after all it's easy to make sweeping assumptions when you're busy analyzing life & not experiencing it & therefore not subject to all the complexities therein.

not evenly but i'd beg to disagree. quads of steel! helped keep the weight off too.

It's also a "prívílege" to own your own house, or eat healthful food, or not work in a sweatshop, but I fail to see why those who have the opportunity to do those things should abstain simply because it's an opportunity not universally available.

Great, good thing quads are the only muscles people care about.

no the problem is when it becomes a cultural norm aka gateway to the middle class. you don't actually NEED a ba to push papers, but it helps!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the professional goalpost mover.

Guess we don't need journalists, artists, lawyers, philosophers, theoreticians, historians, economists, etc. Just a bunch of useless shit!

Hey I was a dropout too, college isn't for everyone. But you're just parroting reactionary propaganda here. STEM worship is cancer.

Kill yourself.

huh

At what point did I even remotely imply otherwise? To reiterate, my points have been that a) education in the arts and humanities has intrinsic value, regardless of its financial return, b) it's wrong to look down on people pursuing these as merely "too stupid" to do STEM, and c) it's a shame that more people don't have the opportunity to study these subjects.

Not to be a dick, but perhaps an education in liberal arts would have helped you to follow along in this conversation.

I haven't shifted any goalposts.

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yikes a little bit of elitism here?

if you were a little bit more perceptive and a little less defensive you'd realize that i'm not actually disagreeing with you, rather sharing my thoughts. i don't really give a shit what you do, i'm just pointing out that a BA degree has become largely a tool to maintain class hegemony, and that by defending a uni education as a cultural norm you may be further strengthening that. just a thought.

i think it's excellent and self-defeating to not align yourself to the demands of the economy, and, to a lesser extent, others' needs. i believe that people with specific talents should definitely nurture those but if you're just going to uni to get a decent job & aren't really bothered what you study… why not simply go to trade school instead?

lol wordfilter replaces problema t i c with excellent

I said "don't really". Obviously I'm aware that biking uses muscles. The point is that biking isn't going to do anything for the other 90% of your muscles. Gyms are undeniably helpful for exercising and getting /fit/, which is something a lot of people care about. Sure, if you narrowly redefine fitness as "being good at cycling" then cycling is adequate for anyone.

It's not elitist to want the people I'm speaking with to possess a modest level of reading comprehension.

And actually you have repeatedly shat on non-STEM students for being stupid, "p r i v i l i g e d", and pursuing worthless subjects. So don't pretend now that you're just making some point about class hegemony. Complaints about "spoilt liberal arts majors" and evangelising about trade schools is a stock line for closeted classcucks like yourself.

seems you're the one with the reading comprehension problem m8. i hope liberal arts college taught you other skills besides the sophistry on display itt. which is impressive btw.

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I think you've got a bit of ideology stuck between your teeth there. You should pick it out.

If you want a job, go to trade school, if you want to learn things you interested about, become and autodidact, if you wanna become hopelessly in debt with no hope of escape, go to university.

Most of Holla Forums are self-described "autodidacts" and look how well that works out for them. :^)

face it kiddo, uni is a massive waste of time unless you're set up well enough to not do anything else. maybe then you get some learning out of it. for the rest of us, almost anything else is higher ROI.

Hahaha I'm broke as fuck my parents don't have capital.