Education in the USA: What happened, guys?

Hey there, hope you're well this fine day. Got a bit of a late start on the day this morning due to some sleep troubles, I sure envy those of us who have never struggled with their sleep (do those people exist?).

So something that's been on my mind a bit recently since the USG-ov decided that they were going to subsidize another 10k of people's education loans is education in general. Whether you feel one way or another on that topic, I don't really intend to delve that far into whether or not that's a good move for the government to be making. I have my own political views, but I don't really intend to talk about that all day since arguing with people gets tiring after a while.

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So how did our higher education system get to be what it is today? Certainly, there are still good aspects of it. Some of the programs we have here are the best in the world, right? The main problem is that MOST of our higher education is low quality, expensive drivel.

So, if you were to go to school to be a musician and play with an orchestra. You have to get your MASTER'S at a school with a great music program AND have to make sure that at least a couple of your teachers have connections to an orchestra. Not only that, but in-between doing all your music classes and everything else - gotta make sure you get those math and literature courses in. If you don't know your math and literature, you couldn't possible play the Clarinet well enough to be in an orchestra. And don't forget those extra electives! Those are important! Gotta spend thousands of dollars to sleep through an class on stargazing - No kidding, I know someone who did that (granted they weren't a music major, but yeah).

A good 50% of any given bachelor's degree has no actual application to your field of study or life in general. That's just money getting flushed down the toilet.

^{Or burned...}

Honestly, for some people, getting the bachelor's is just flushing money down the toilet anyways because they get some crappy degree in nonsense because it's easy to pass from some school where they get to socialize most of the time. I know tons of people who have full bachelor's degrees and they work in some low level job where everyone's paid the same way regardless of their education.

But they got that school debt still. 1 in 4. 1 in 4 people in the US has a student loan, averaging around 40k. Your average 20-30 y/o mankind a 400/mo. payment (as of 2016)¹.

Presumably your average maximum debt amount is higher than that. Might as well just subtract 5k from your annual salary from the moment you enroll school until the moment you pay off your loan, plus the amount you lose for the 4 years you don't work (as much) while you're in school. Which is apparently averaging about 20 years after graduation.

Sure paying off some of that student debt could help the people who hold student debt, but it doesn't really stop the bigger issues of costs getting out of control and quality going into the toilet.

^{Yae Cerlage!}

I thought that the entire point of going to college was to get educated in a particular field so that you could obtain gainful employment in that field. And, if you get a degree that is tailored towards that end, you will actually still come out ahead over a couple of decades (statistically anyways). I would hypothesize that temperament has a fair degree to do with people who are going to get engineering degrees earning more than people who don't go to any post secondary education. Someone who is driven, hard working, and intelligent is probably going to out earn someone who is unmotivated, lazy, and dumb in general - even among those who don't have their degrees.

Trade schools seem to be a pretty good option. I mean, one of the cheapest ones would be getting your CDL-A which is super in demand. Average salary for people with their CDL-A is 60k (vs a bachelors 64k) and a CDL-A course costs less than $5k². Shoot, you can get a CDL-A course for free if you go work for amazon (and several other companies) for a year.

Honestly, I think there's no excuse to have so many filler credits in a degree, and that is one of the big problems with our current system. There are just so many courses tacked onto EVERY degree that have absolutely nothing to do with the field. One of my friends had to take some sort of course on how the patriarchy is evil and whatever just so she could go be a nurse. What application does that sort of information have on the day to day work of a Nurse?

How does it help you to give an injection to a patient? Or dress a wound? Or assess a patient's vitals?

^{Here's your identity politics injection, sir!}

I can't see a single way that it's applicable. At least at a trade school all you learn is a trade. Some of them are every bit as comprehensive as a bachelors (in their field of study), they just don't qualify as a bachelors since they don't waste 2,500+ hours of your time on useless credits (not including time spent studying outside of class). The class hours alone that you waste studying crap you don't need to know are equivalent to roughly a year and 3 months of working a full time job.

Time is the most precious thing we have in this life, and we have somehow convinced young people that they to waste thousands of hours studying subjects (if you can call it that) that have absolutely no application on their life or their job. If they ever need, let's say, college level algebra skills in their lifetime. It'll probably be so long after they were in school that they don't even remember how to do what they need to and they'll just be resorting to someone else (Groorgle) solving the problem for them anyways.

There's one simple way to reduce costs... Get rid of the fluff.
But of course, that'd be bad for business.

The professors teaching nothing are cheaper to keep around, so your profit per credit hour is UP UP UP UP!
And the government is going to subsidize the costs and the student debt anyways, so what you can charge is UP UP UP UP!

I don't even want to go very far into that topic, since it cuts very close to them forgiving student debt.
If you ask me, the government shouldn't be funneling money into these bloated wasteful educational institutions.
But it's just another case of the USG being in bed with corporations and doing everything they can to make sure they get their "due".
Just another case of the USG mismanaging both money and infrastructure.

But that's a topic for a whole other day.

Thanks for listening to (reading?) the rant. Had a weird start to the morning, so sorry if it was a bit of a scrambled-@brains post.

• Guurg

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https://www.pexels.com/@arthousestudio/
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^{References:
1 - [https://www.nitrocollege.com/research/average-student-loan-debt]
2 - [https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-college-graduate-salary/]
2 -[https://www.zippia.com/truck-driver-jobs/salary/#]}

and off to nap again