Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[AdrienIer]

Nobody here wants to shut anyone out of anything

The status quo is shutting out a lot of people out of higher education. Advocate against it then.

"Being born rich isn't a crime" : I'm not advocating firing squads for the wealthy, I'm advocating for the "land of opportunity" to actually give everyone a chance even if it reduces the built in advantage rich people get.

[TheArchduke]

One of the biggest fallacies that the leftist side of politics falls victim.

If everyone has a good, it is not worth anything. Same with education.

By allowing everyone (too many) to have it they made it worthless.

If everyone has enough to eat meals are worthless?
If everyone has a roof overhead homes are worthless?

You really prefer a world were the poor can starve to death out in the streets and don't get any chance at education?


IMO we have far too many uneducated idiots running around in this world to be a miser with education.

Where does it say no education?


First of all, yeah college is a luxury commodity meant to ensure a job. Everyone has it? It degenerates to a basic ability like "can read".

How you jump from calling college for everyone (which is idiotic as college skills are useless to the vast majority of people) to no food to everyone is flabbergasting to me.

An education like "Lehre" in Germany, where you learn useful skills from age 14 to 18 and then just simply go to work is vastly preferable to the university for everyone attitude.

Also the whole discussion misses the point, we do not have enough useful jobs for everyone by now.

[SadGit]

Which is unthinkable to those who worship the rich.

Leaving aside the Glen Beckian "come the revolution we shall burn their cathedrals leaving them to worship dirt instead".

How will you ensure that only those deserving go to university. Denmarks has had "free" education for ages, and grants + loans for the last 50+ years. A highschool diplomas was the entrance exam, then as more and more got that, your grades. From field to field based on the number of spots available, so near perfect grades in classical language would give a spot at law or medicine.
But in a fit of social engineering based on parts "everyone carries the marshalls staff in his backpack" and parts "hmm silk top hat wearing peeps seem to be more healthy and wealthy; why dont we give everyone a silk top hat and solve all the problems at once" there was a major push to get everyone into highschool.

And thats why my generation had our heads filled with tradeskills/schools are for dummies. Which lead to near all but the dummies avoiding them. But also to a lot of kids barely scraping by highschool ending with a diploma that was near worthless.

Since all education is public there is no control mechanisms to ensure only those ready will enter education. If the state (and general population) want a push towards degrees for all/free lunch, it will happen. Highschools and universities get funding per head enrolled. ->too many failing ->funding by heads passinge exams -> near everyone passing exams.

All the while the general push for more qualifications means the tradeschools are pushed to take recovering addicts, criminals and the bottom 10% broompushers -> a lack of qualified workers..

There is no such thing as free education. We all agree it takes some work to pass, so clearly not a gift. As a Dane Im so used to taxation so we can ignore that money spent on making education could be spent on other things, We can ignore that professors and teachers could spend their time teaching to the gifted rather than facebookchecking hungover do-nothings. But we cant ignore the time spent. 3-5+ years that might give you a near useless degree (by field) with bottom grades, that time could have been spent earning money or learning something usefull. Instead we have bitter youth with student loans and no chance of employment in their field, many of whom left to blame institutional racism, internalised mysoginy or worshim of the wealthy as the cause of their problems.

It should not be possible to flunk a thesis or bach thesis. Not because they are easy, but because you should have (been) flunked long before that. And yet, during my brief visit to modern day university I met several such students. Im all for having a university focused on say 20% of pop based on grades and entrance exam, Ill even throw in some relevant field/life experience to make up for low grades. In Denmark that would be a bloodbath.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Nobody said it and the gif isn't neonazi, AdrienIer is just having a fit processing alternative viewpoints. Albeit Gavagai has something like a talent for phrasing his views in just such a way to cause foaming at mouth, mostly by including triggering references that he himself declares to be largely gratuitous.

Guys, the gif where Keanu Reeves tells everyone that racisms isn't real isn't really a neonazi meme, you'll need to go back to Ipecac's other spicy memes, where he hangs out with an SS officer and has fun times drinking at a bar.

Which by the way isn't a nazi meme either, yikes, why are you so fascist-phobic about it, sheesh.

[Bacchus]

The status quo is shutting out a lot of people out of higher education.

59% of adults in US in 2015 had completed some college. This is a very high number. As brought up by others above, many of those people have no real need for college, but are being pressured by your 'charity' and 'desire to make society better' into wasting at least some years in pursuing qualifications that are worthless to them and to others (same 2015 survey shows only 33% of adults having actually completed a degree). In Germany, the bulk of adults pursue vocational qualifications and everyone is better for it.

Higher education should be open to everyone who needs it -- scientists, medical doctors, engineers, some professions. What others need is the removal of the ridiculous expectation that you are somehow not a complete human unless you spent years 18-21 listening to some fifth-rate researcher recite the fundamentals of an abstract discipline from a textbook. I mean, I went to a reasonably good university and did well at it, and it's really nothing but a luxury, hardly anyone in my peer group really needeed it, and the sooner society stops demanding tertiary qualifications to even consider a candidate for a job, the better. Of course, the charitable left pushes for just the opposite -- to force EVERYONE to spend years doing nothing just to be admitted to a rat race. Very thoughtful, very caring. God forbid the do-gooders would stop and think about people who can't leave their town to attend university, for whatever reason, who just want a local job they are perfectly capable of doing well.

The amount of damage, actual, honest-to-God damage that's being dealt, the hundred of thousands of human years being sacrificed on this altar annually makes me absolutely livid. And yet, the cruel God of 'making the society better for all' is never satsified. More, bring me more, everyone, until 21, until 25, forget all about actual human needs and the work neccessary to fulfill them, it's the futile toil of making everyone equal you are slaves to now. Not for your own sake, not for anyone's sake, for assuaging a neurosis grown and cherished in the minds of people without real problems in their lives.

[Rowain]

Where does it say no education?

Your words:

Same with education.

By allowing everyone (too many) to have it they made it worthless.

How you jump from calling college for everyone (which is idiotic as college skills are useless to the vast majority of people) to no food to everyone is flabbergasting to me.

Again your own words :

If everyone has a good, it is not worth anything.

First of all, yeah college is a luxury commodity meant to ensure a job. Everyone has it? It degenerates to a basic ability like "can read".

An education like "Lehre" in Germany, where you learn useful skills from age 14 to 18 and then just simply go to work is vastly preferable to the university for everyone attitude.

For one you need to have the skills and the interest to go into a "Lehre". Then you need to have enough places for those interested. There are many jobs where far more people interested to start a "Lehre" as there are places to learn it.

Second Where did you get the notion that a college-degree means an assured job? Thats not been true since many decades.

Thirdly: Just because everyone no matter which background (rich or poor) has the chance to get a Master doesn't mean everyone will get it. The drop-out-number is high enough to ensure that a Master is still something rather rare and not common good.

Also the whole discussion misses the point, we do not have enough useful jobs for everyone by now.

That is not an effect of education but simple of modern times (many manchines helping to do the work) and global trade (cheeper to produce where 1$/month is a high income).

[TheArchduke]

Hmm, I should have clarified. College (University education) which is tailored or was tailored for scientific purposes in most cases.

If everyone has a good it is not worth anything, it is taken for granted rings very true. Bread for instance only gets value, when it is not readily available. If everyone has access to it, it becomes more and more worthless in the eyes of the public.

The notion that a college-degree means an assured job? Pretty much the only explanation I can think off for stuffing our universities to the brim with useless studies and huge amounts of people.

Maybe there is another reasoning for this?

[darrelljs]

College is not for everyone, but everyone its for should attend.

I'm not sure which you see less of, average poor children matriculating or average wealthy children not.

Darrell

[AdrienIer]

59% of adults in US in 2015 had completed some college.

And yet you don't ask yourself the right question : which 59% are they ? When you make post-high school education so expensive you make money the main hurdle, when it should be academic results and motivation instead. You're also making it a lot harder for poorer people to succeed in university, because of the burden of their debt.

I'm depressed by how some people champion the "if you're poor it's because you didn't get the skills that employers want" POV while refusing to acknowledge that getting the skills that employers want is usually very expensive in the US. You're putting the means of getting rich behind a paywall, and not accepting that it creates a vicious cycle.

[T-hawk]

I'm depressed by how some people champion the "if you're poor it's because you didn't get the skills that employers want" POV while refusing to acknowledge that getting the skills that employers want is usually very expensive in the US. You're putting the means of getting rich behind a paywall, and not accepting that it creates a vicious cycle.

Getting the skills doesn't have to be expensive.  In my field of computer science, there's any amount of free tutorials and resources and tools online.

What's expensive is the credentialism.  Employers either can't accurately judge the skills, don't want to try in the limited time-frame of interviewing, or are legally prohibited from doing so (when it results in too much correlation with race.)  So they fall back on outsourcing that to the colleges.  Who in turn of course entirely take economic advantage of that granted position as the gatekeeper of access to those 20% professionally productive jobs.

Is the logic 'giving everyone subsidies to attend Harvard won't actually increase the number of places in Harvard, only Harvard's fees' really that challenging to process?

This is the logic that is challenging to process: Increasing the number of places in Harvard does not create economic activity and wealth.  Increasing the number of places in Harvard means those additional Harvard grads settle for lower-end professional jobs, which bumps state-university grads into unskilled jobs.

To be clear to others touching on this accusation: I am not advocating to withhold or elitize education, or anything like that, to keep my privilege or any other such reason.  I am pointing out the facts of economic reality and that they can't be abolished by leftist wishcasting.