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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Higher Ed (and Ed) has declined once again as well. There are many majors that are, to be completely honest, jokes and shouldn't even exist. I personally had plenty of classes that I wrote an essay and knew I would get an A as long as I agree with the professor's/teacher's pet political views, or the same paper would mysteriously be docked a few points. High Schools teach less Shakespeare, and more random children's books that aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Liberal Arts and Humanities spend too much time on pet modern social justice causes, and not enough time on Cicero, Aristotle, etc. If we go back to a solid foundation of a classical education, actually reading the great works in school, leaning into critical thinking, and adding rigor, then higher education will actually be worth it. Math and Science I believe is still pretty solid and rigorous in higher ed but k-12 needs to be totally revamped.

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I think quite a bit of this phenomenon should be attributed to how young adults choose their education/career path. We're still in the "you can be whatever you want" and "if you make your passion into your work, you won't work a single day in your life" phase of the civilizational boom/bust cycle. Do high schoolers familiarize themselves with the supply and demand per field or do they wing that part/ignore it? For the fields that they feel pulled to, do they consider which people become financially well off after graduating in it? E.g. is it mainly authors, public speakers and professors, all basically in educational roles, making the field a government subsidized ponzi scheme? And do they on an ethical level consider which layer of society's hierarchy of needs their future expertise will feed into? As in, does the subject revolve around pleasure maxing in the upper echelons, or will it be useful for infrastructure, supply chains, defense, health,...

It seems that most people wing most of those points in a pursuit for what they think their life's passion to be at 18 years old. And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices, at least afaik, instead relying on the import of immigrant experts while at the same time experiencing massive brain drain to better off countries, e.g Germans moving to Switzerland en masse.

> And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices

NYS, as much as I complain about the state government, does actually do this a bit. One is the BOCES program which is an adult education system that teach trades, and highschoolers can go to for free (Think diesel mechanics, carpentry, and also things like computer repair or networking). The other is that there is a system for free associate degrees for adults 25+ (recently the requirement for them to not have a college degree was removed so that there can be reskilling), but the limitation is career focused jobs. So you can get a free associates degree in nursing, health sciences, engineering technology, metal fabrication, etc. but not in say literature.

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