Luckily I'm from a country where university is still reasonably affordable .. in fact, since I left, they've made it so fees are government-funded for the first few years. Even though I did have a student loan, it was at least interest-free.
I think university education should be seen as an extension of all earlier education. If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?
Personally, I think the time I had at university was massively useful to my educational development. Even though a lot of what I learnt during that time I consider to be "self-taught", the university environment seemed much more conducive to self learning than the working environment, where you do what your company wants for 8 hours a day then spend the rest of the day trying to defocus.
Just like primary and secondary education, it seems insane to me to just think about tertiary education as some concrete monetary investment. If you give everyone the opportunity to spend a short amount of time (like 3 or 4 years, out of a career period of 45 years) focusing on a particular field of their choosing, surely there must be a massive benefit there to society.
Edit: Also, it should probably be pointed out that a lot of research that happens at universities is used in industry, so if the university system continues to be undermined, you can expect these gains to be lost. We're probably mostly programmers, right? Try pointing to a significant feature of any programming language (old or new) that isn't taken straight from academia.
> If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?
Yes, this age is something we should wonder and re-wonder often over time. Is all the delayed adolescence of the current state desirable? Do all people need 4 years of high school? Do all degrees need to take 4 years for wildly different fields? Would many people benefit from a "work study" version of high school instead? Etc.
I really dislike the idea of providing a monetary incentive for kids to stop going to school. People who are not well-off are going to be pressured into taking this path, causing a further arbitrary wealth gap within the population.
But the alternative path is not necessarily one of less learning. Many people, both gifted and not, detest academics and feel school is a kind of prison or CAFO. This would give them more options. It would give bullied kids more options too, or kids looking to get away from gang activity in their (bad) school.
> But the alternative path is not necessarily one of less learning
The problem is this still doesn't solve the wage gap. Businesses look for concrete ways to determine someone's skill, and a Diploma/GED and college education provide them easy standards to set for who can even get to the interview process. Not many CS jobs will take anyone who only lists "self-taught", even if they have some amazing code work linked (this is especially true for recruiters).
I can relate- as a 16-year-old teenager with soldering abilities, knowledge of OS X, Windows, and Linux (including data recovery) it was quite saddening / depressing (I honesly don't know the right word to describe it) to hear that I couldn't get a job, or even an apprenticeship at any of the local computer repair shops because I wasn't old enough.
This isn't a 1:1 comparison, because being young is a legal problem, but I definitely feel your pain- and the pain of others in that situation- it's a serious downer and quite demoralizing for someone to say no just because you don't have a certificate (in this case, a DL). It's honestly really hard to get someone to take a chance on you.
That's why I don't mention being self taught anywhere in a resume. If it comes up in a phone screen or interview I'll explain, but other that, I hope "out of site, out of mind" will come into play
I think university education should be seen as an extension of all earlier education. If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?
Personally, I think the time I had at university was massively useful to my educational development. Even though a lot of what I learnt during that time I consider to be "self-taught", the university environment seemed much more conducive to self learning than the working environment, where you do what your company wants for 8 hours a day then spend the rest of the day trying to defocus.
Just like primary and secondary education, it seems insane to me to just think about tertiary education as some concrete monetary investment. If you give everyone the opportunity to spend a short amount of time (like 3 or 4 years, out of a career period of 45 years) focusing on a particular field of their choosing, surely there must be a massive benefit there to society.
Edit: Also, it should probably be pointed out that a lot of research that happens at universities is used in industry, so if the university system continues to be undermined, you can expect these gains to be lost. We're probably mostly programmers, right? Try pointing to a significant feature of any programming language (old or new) that isn't taken straight from academia.