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Comment by MarkMarine | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, do you have a college degree, and do you think the majority of the population being generally educated is actually a bad thing?

I can understand the reaction to the cost, and many people work outside of the degree they majored in, but I do value the general education of the population. It’s been a remarkably uplifting force in society, if you look back over history.

I also wonder what that means for the competition between nations, it seems like the countries that I think are doing well really lean in to general education of their populations.

I came to college a different way, I went into the Marines first and only attended college after that. I didn’t live in the dorm and didn’t have a traditional college experience, but I am glad every day that I didn’t just have engineering classes.

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education is good compared to sitting on your hands for four years. it's not necessarily good compared to all the other things a person could have done in that time or the other ways those resources could have been used.

personally, I don't think that giving every 18yo a full ride to study whatever they feel like for four years is a great use of public funds. I would rather see targeted funding to fill in demonstrable gaps in the labor force.

We are talking about taking something that individuals pay for, that costs about $40k in total at affordable schools, and making it totally free for as many people who want it.

If additional people want to pay beyond the cap, wonderful. But I don’t see how the financials make any sense otherwise.

I'm just going to default to the: how do you think other countries do it?

I'm really tired of being told "we can't afford to give healthcare" "we can't afford to give higher education" "we can't afford early childcare" "we can't afford maturity leave" "we can't afford guaranteed sick/vacation"

Of course we can. The powers at be don't want that because it levels the playing field, costs them some money, and ultimately makes them less powerful.

A number of other countries do it by separating students into different tracks bound for university, the trades, or unskilled labor, respectively, already while they are schoolchildren. Public universities are free or nearly so, but the system ensures that only a portion of society is directed to them. Those who didn't get on the university track while still at school may be able to gain a public university education later as adults, but the process is complicated enough that many are discouraged, or in some countries they turn to private universities that are not free.

I’m sick of people saying we can afford everything! We really, truly can’t. We have the largest peace time deficit of all time - we are running deficits the size of WW2 when no emergency exists!

The good part is that all of this will sort itself out. Economic gravity will hit and democracy will sort out who pays the bill.

could you answer those questions I asked you?

On this thread I prefer to debate in the abstract rather than let emotions into it.

Emotionally speaking my friend’s kid has muscular dystrophy and it’s extremely sad and heart wrenching to watch what was formerly an active toddler degrade into wheel chair bound pain and suffering, leading to a death around 30 years old. I wish society would put unlimited funds into solving this disease because I personally see how devastating it is to my friend’s family and the child himself.

However in an argument about where to allocate scarce resources, putting all of our money into solving that is probably not what most people would choose.

Similarly I don’t think unlimited free education to every 18 year old is a good choice, despite emotional pleas.

but that education would allow more people to do research on muscular dystrophy and other problems.

if we want to solve the worlds problems we need more people with the capacity to work on them. only education is capable of doing that.

That answers the question. You’ve got a college degree, probably for a lot less than kids today are faced with paying, you’re probably quite successful and yet… it’s just not enough right. The most important thing is that you keep as much wealth as you can. The broader concerns of what’s good for society, that shouldn’t come into play. You got yours, how do you stay there if not by keeping the rest down and not contributing

When you don’t like someone’s arguments, attack the source!

I like to use rhetoric to debate topics, ideally with facts and statistics. Attacking someone else personally, or making up a lot of stuff about them, is a very weak line of attack (for me at least) when trying to push your point forwards.

This is an anonymous Internet forum so I don’t have a degree, I was raised by a single mother and an abusive uncle who beat me with a belt when I asked for more eggs at breakfast. What difference does it make?

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