You made that straw man, not me.

Not at all. Neither directly nor implicitly. Look at your posts dude. Look at mine. The whole premise involving productivity is entirely your idea. You came up with that entirely on your own. Moreover, my position is and has been that the productivity topic is a red herring. Rather, I was giving you the opportunity, and the benefit of the doubt, to explain why you think it has any relevance at all, and you couldn't do that. Congratulations, you're incompetent.

No, no, no, and no. Again, this is your straw man, not mine. You built it, you tear it down yourself. Your talking points have the smell of a chatgpt hallucination.

Except I'm not. In fact, I've stated this numerous times already on slashdot: High money supply caused by excessive availability of student loans means educational institutions have little incentive to control costs. So guess what? Many of them don't, and it shows. Is that the only cause? Nope, but it's safe to say that reducing the availability of them would lower costs, and quite a bit at that, without sacrificing anything that we expect of educational institutions. As I already showed you, this has already happened before, and very recently at that.

Nope. In fact, I've done exactly the opposite on this: People here love to pin all the blame on health insurance companies, and worse, believe shooting people who run them in the back is totally justified. You're probably one of them at this rate. Meanwhile, it's been my position that there are a lot of things at play here.

Either way, you can stop projecting your incompetence already.

On the other hand, this used to be what academia was all about. Essentially, trivial pursuits of knowledge that didn't necessarily have any real-world value. Most people who engaged in this were already wealthy enough that the economic utility didn't really factor into it. Then, somehow we used these very same institutions as a form of vocational training, which is probably a bad idea.

For completeness’s sake, I'm not at all the opinion that these need to go away entirely, however I do think that they should be funded much the same way that scientific research is funded through government grants. It should NOT be funded with random Tom, Dick, and Harry's who take up an ill-conceived effort to make a career out of it, complete with massive student loan debt that they then expect the taxpayer to reimburse, even though their day job is more than likely going to mean that all the education they got ultimately goes nowhere. And, like scientific discovery, only a handful of people are needed to document any findings. There's absolutely no need for an entire graduating class of students every single year to study only one aspect of history -- if they want to study history that badly, the best way they could contribute to the field is by majoring in anthropology, particularly by getting their hands dirty by either digging through dirt or digging through archives of historical documents.

No, you didn't. All you did was spew weasel words combined with a poor attempt at misdirection. You're sitting here making vague claims about additional costs being necessary for economy-wide production gains, which you're just assuming without any justification whatsoever, must somehow apply to higher education, then adding speculation on top. So be specific: What productivity gains are you talking about in particular? Productivity gains should mean increased instructional value gained from less effort, and yet where's the evidence in support of that? From that article, we even see indications to the contrary:

Tenured faculty tend to be more productive, and yet they're being reduced in number and even being replaced with people, some of them being other students, who are arguably less productive. So how is it you believe that these costs are to provide for increased productivity, when they're actually reducing their instructional expenses without any indication that there's an increase in productivity? Do you still think it's by stuffing more students into the same class? Again, you tell me. And actually explain yourself this time.

Something that might help, by the way:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...

If you read again what I wrote, I was commenting in the need to take crap, not the willingness. It is a difference and a rather big one.

That wouldn't be surprising if it's already happening anyway, given schools are spending more on administrative costs while in at least some cases actually reducing instructional spending. But across the board, administrative expenses are growing faster than instructional expenses.

https://www.usnews.com/educati...

It's already happening despite increased inflation-adjusted tuition rates, so you tell me.

Well, I can see that you never made that experience. I have.

Yet you're the one who speaks favorably about shoplifting.

Which you failed to do when you talked your "kid" into spending huge sums of money that he never even had for a degree that's basically worthless, and will pay for it for the rest of his life.

https://www.merriam-webster.co...

So what does that say about you, given you're even less intelligent than they are?

You both are wrong. The question is whether it's worth the cost. There's no question or concern over political crap like rsilvergun thinks there is. The question is more: Do you get what you pay for?

And to me, this isn't a simple yes or no answer. The answer I'd give is: What degree did you get, and what did you pay for it? No matter what degree you have, I'd say that if you spent more than $150k, under any circumstance, then you got ripped off. Period.

rsilvergun keeps whining that his imaginary "kid" borrowed $300,000. There is no rhyme or reason to spend that much for any degree, let alone one that has nearly zero chance of ever paying that off within his lifetime. And worse, he blames that on, of all things, republicans, even though the government has been keeping up with inflation when it comes to pell grants and other funding.

And at the same time, he holds blameless the very institutions who have been raising their tuition rates at several times the rate of inflation for decades, and then conned his dumb as into believing that he needs this really bad, even though he really didn't. Or at the very least, he could have done far better by going to community college first, then going to a public in-state university, where borrowing may not even be necessary at all. But at the end of the day, we live in a free society, which also includes being free to make one incredibly bad life decision right after the other.

Indeed. People with a good education have _options_. And that means they do not have to take crap. Obviously, quite a few assholes do not like to have that type of person around.

It really depends. As degrees in the US are a big business, there are many worthless degrees and many that you can get easily, making them worthless if you did it the easy way.

Funny thing. The largest private (i.e. for profit) University in Germany currently has problems because many students find the degrees are not valuable and they do not learn a lot. No such problems with the regular ones. I think commercial education is just broken because of perverted incentives.

Getting a degree does not absolve you from really learning and being good at things. I think a significant pert of the people with degrees that have trouble finding jobs did select "easy" ones or took it wayyyy to easy getting them. Commercial "education" will make that easy, but you waste your time and money that way.

Then surely you can provide ample evidence of that.

By definition, a wall of text is unformatted. The proper term is rant.

They're not you, either. Yet you're sitting here trying to tell me, based on your own experiences and biases, that the local content is superior while also saying that the majority aren't going to care enough about it to pay for it. You're literally arguing against yourself. I'm not. I still remember talking to a few Aussies about this exact issue on reddit (or something, I don't recall exactly) and they kept going on to rant about an American pop singer named Kesha (who I'd never even heard of by that point) always making their top ten charts for upwards of four months at a time. I really doubt that was due to her being heavily promoted or something like that. Rather, Australians just really liked her music more than anybody else, including ones in her own country. If this was purely due to promotional efforts, then why on earth wouldn't they promote artists that were already doing much better in much larger markets?

The simplest explanation is the most likely. Besides, what would local music there even sound like? Mel Gibson playing a didgeridoo? More ACDC?

It also doesn't mean anything. You might recall the cola wars. Or the sneaker wars during the same period. The party that massively out-spent the other quite often didn't win. People keep repeating this same line about politics as well, but conveniently ignore all the candidates (e.g. Hillary) who massively outspent their opponent (e.g. Trump.) And that is nowhere close to being the first time this happened. Hell, look at the lessons learned during Lessig's Mayday Pac, which was a complete and utter flop.

Because people without degrees are often just envious.

I routinely ask my part-time students why they chose to get that degree after all. It is "need more skills for my job", "no career options without that degree" and sometimes "I really want to know more about things". This mostly students that are interested in IT security though, no idea how representative that is.

My recollection was it being taught during middle school, though me (and I think most of my classmates) weren't paying much attention and probably forgot much of it. In my case likely due to (later diagnosed) ADHD. But either way, most of that knowledge came of my own accord whenever it became relevant. I suspect that in these cases of foreigners knowing more about our government than their own is under similar circumstances. I wouldn't be surprised eastern europeans have this the worst in the form of iron curtain states pushing the message of "this is what it's like over there, see how bad it is? ours is better" with whatever that was at the time no longer existing, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Even now, I've been (re-)learning academic stuff from youtube videos of Neil Degrasse Tyson, Veritasium, or even outright history lectures from Sean Munger and Sarah Paine.

Ah, so "stupid" is what you are going for. Gotcha.