If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore. There really isn't even any need to attend K-12 schools.
It may be better to go to formal physical schools, but it's no longer necessary. Not by a long shot.
It's just going to take another few decades for society to adjust to the fact that university degrees are no longer really that valuable and figure out new ways to evaluate individual competency.
>If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to self study well enough to get an education like you can get from a (good) university program. Studying is hard! Maybe it is not so hard to learn a little bit. But to learn something with rigour and focus takes a lot of effort, especially if you have other problems to deal with as well. Aside from the value signalling of a degree, paid courses provide a strong motivation to do the uncomfortable and often unrewarding activity of studying.
Source: my own experiences with self-study and a recently started Masters in Biostatistics by distance education, all while working casually or full time.
For most people, a university is the most time-efficient method of gaining education in any given technical topic. It's not guaranteed to be the most cost-efficient, but I don't see a defensible argument that the resources of a university don't make it possible to learn faster than self-study, for the modal student.
Discipline isn't the only obstacle for autodidacts. If nothing else, at a university you have professors, adjuncts and TAs with office hours who can help you learn something in a fraction of the time it would take to learn by studying a textbook or watching lectures online alone.
For example, vanishingly few people manage to teach themselves an undergraduate math curriculum without going through university.
Long term the current university system is dead. I expect that some universities will exist for another hundred years, but not in it's current form.
Previous decades you had to go to a university to get access to resources that simply didn't exist in the rest of the world. Large libraries, labs, lectures, etc etc. Nowadays the internet can provide vastly superior resources then any Library for the most part. Sure there are lots of stuff not yet on there, but that issue that isn't going to exist forever.
Quality courses exist for free. Lots of others are available for hundreds were at colleges they cost thousands. Access to experts is something you can pay for. Don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on books. Can concentrate on what is important to you and you can go at your own pace. People who want to network and peers can still have access to one another through meetups and online messaging. etc etc.
K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors for subjects you are not great on.
People think you need to government to solve the cost of education, meanwhile individuals and companies have reduced the cost of education to nearly zero in most cases. Just won't get those special degree certificates that everybody covets. But that won't last forever either.
>K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors for subjects you are not great on.
I think that is silly. Really silly. You have no evidence for this. Learning is mostly a matter of motivation. It's like assuming that having an encyclopedia could replace instruction.
K12 education is way better than we think it is. It's just in the interest of k12 public education for people to think it is bad, so that it gets more resources. But it is one of the better functioning institutions in America. Much better and more per-dollar efficient at creating public value than the police, military or medical system.
Consider, would you rather have the bottom half of society skip it? I'd be terrified of a less educated populace.
K-12 in the US was heavily influenced by Prussian ideology, to turn schools into factories of subordinate, authority-fearing citizens. It’s why schools are filled with abusive, inept tyrants that bore kids to tears and often scar them so much that they’ll never take interest in things like math or literature.
Germany heavily influenced American government and institutions (schooling, esp. the academy which usually ends up pushing cultural changes and crafting institutions when they become administrators) during the 19th up to early 20th century. I think it's short-sighted to say that (which she does in the article you linked) because schools aren't exact replicas of factories, the Prussian influence idea is completely unfounded history.
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
> K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors for subjects you are not great on.
I'd wager social skills are the most important things you learn in school with peers. Having to work with others, compromise with others, build self-awareness, talk to the opposite sex, and understand social hierarchies.
You can always learn "stuff" later in life, but it's very hard to change your core social identity.
People with no social skills are basically the underlings of society, like 4chan shut-ins and incels. Dismissing K-12 just seems like a way to guarantee even more children are robbed of their social development.
Real world environments aren't age segregated with the only authority figure being significantly older. Middle school is hellish precisely because of this.
Degrees, especially from prestigious schools, have become a kind of writ of noble title that can be purchased. Systems like that can be very sticky. Everyone who has one has a vested interest in preserving their value (like taxi medallions) and HR people can easily use them as a shortcut to hiring decisions that they'll never look dumb for making. The latter is the "nobody ever got fired for..." effect.
The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply, forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.
> The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply, forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.
I don't think that is the "only thing".
Many employers look for degrees because they are seen as valuable. But they are not necessarily valuable in the most obvious way. A lot of time people are not really interested in what you went to school for at all. The are only interested if you have a degree or not.
This signals to employers that they are interviewing somebody that is willing to make major personal commitments and defer reward for years for POTENTIAL gain. There is no guarantees that spending 10's of thousands of dollars will result in a good job. People who pay for degrees are hoping this is true. A employer can take advantage of these people easily.
If I needed somebody to just be a cog in a corporate machine and I know that they are wiling to work their ass off and make huge personal commitments on the PROMISE of future pay... then that is awesome. I know they will work their ass off and make huge sacrifices for years and I really don't have to pay them that much at all to do it. And I know that their debt will keep them scared and living paycheck to paycheck so they are not going to want to risk unemployment because of how devastating this is financially.
This is why when I am looking for jobs and employers make hard demands on educational certificates that they are probably assholes. It's fine to want degrees, but they are not willing to take professional experience as a alternative then that is a huge red flag.
Yeah it's sticky, but you can't expect the current situation to last forever.
Great I really want my bridges cars and medical instruments developed by someone who consumed video bits explaining how it is done.
Just because this approach works for CS and a lot of humanities classes this can not be generalized. I have the feeling on here the technology optimism sometimes clouds the view on the reality.
Just some examples here: biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, medicine... To be any use you have to have more than a couple mooc classes.
Online videos don't work for the humanities either. You really need interaction with your peers to explore new aspects of your subject and move the arts forward.
30 years ago only the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries could have access to a lot of information. Now all you need is to know English and having a reliable internet connection.
I invite you to find the Yellow Peril of Weiner online, or the Allepo Codex. I had to find a copy of Yellow Peril in Cerrar, still stamped declassified from WWII.
It's true a lot more research is online but lots of older books can be hard to find good quality pirated copies of, or have never been scanned.
It's entirely possible for a wage earner to become a millionaire in the USA. Anybody with a middle class income can do it. It's not even complicated or hard to figure out. The problem is that it requires discipline and living under your means.
The first step is to eliminate debt and don't make stupid purchases. Debt includes credit card, personal loans, car loans, and mortgages. Stupid purchases are things like expensive vacations, eating from restaurants all the time, or buying new cars, or buying boats. That sort of thing.
Pretty much: if you buy a brand new car you are a moron if your goal is to increase wealth. You want to do things include living in inexpensive neighborhoods, having secondary sources of income, having no adult 'children' and so on and so forth. Woe is to parents that are still paying for their 20-somethings.
If you go drive around your city and you want to see were "middle-class millionaires" live you need to avoid the 'wealthy' neighborhoods. Look for the 50-something living in a older neighborhood driving older economy cars around.
These people are going to have very low credit scores, as well. The best of them are going to have a credit score of 0, which means no credit history for several years.
Do you calculate the cost of purchases by how many payments can afford in a month? If so you are doing it wrong. Instead you should only ever pay cash. If you don't have money in the bank to pay for it you can't afford it.
The S&P 500 has, historically, provided a 12% return over average 20 year period. If you start off at age 30 and invest 500 dollars a month at that rate it would take you about 26 years to make your first million dollars.
6 years after that would be your 2 million dollar mark. 3 years later would be your 3 million dollar mark. By retirement you would have just under 4 million dollars.
If you make $50k dollars a year then that amounts to about 12% of your income.
You think that is too hard?
The average car payment in the USA is at $550. The average credit card debt is $4,717. At 15% interest and doing minimum payments at $189 that card is going to take 10 years to pay off and $22,869 in total. That means that for every 1 dollar you spend the bank makes 4.
If you can afford to make banks rich you can afford to make yourself rich. Just can't do both at the same time.
I mean, I agree about envelope budgeting and smart saving. Avoid debt is essential to financial health.
> Anybody with a middle class income can do it.
This seems obviously false to me. Let me construct a reasonable case for someone who is middle class income but who I do not believe will be able to meet your savings goals.
Let's assume a single parent, at the median income level of $31,000/year living in Seattle. That gives them $2,500/month to cover food, housing, clothing, childcare, medical care, etc. Rent and health insurance probably eats 1,500 of that alone. To say nothing about saving for a kid's education, buying them school supplies, etc.
Even if you scrimp on food, clothes, etc. you are going to have a real hard time consistently setting aside $500/month.
Any definition of the middle class that doesn't include the middle of incomes seems wrong to me. Median means half above, half below, how would that not be the "middle" class?
I took the national median per capita income. Looking at King County's per capita median income puts it closer to $46k. [1] I also suspect I low balled the housing and medical insurance costs.
Median income in the US per person in 2018 is 35000$. 500$ a month is 6000 a month, or 17% of that before tax. At that income level you probably don't have any income to spare after housing + food + car + health care.
If you (have to) have a car and you've got more than one person in the household I'd say any margin over expenses (savings) under $1000 is just rainy-day money, not retirement savings. It will be eaten by copays, deductibles, new tires, and so on. Just a matter of time. Might go a few months "saving" then bam, kid breaks an arm and you're in it for whatever your annual out-of-pocket max is (may be really high, but bad news, if anything more than the sniffles happens, you're hitting it)
While you're at it, here are other things to avoid if you're middle class and want to get wealthy: having kids, and getting medical attention.
I'm all for saving and spending responsibly, but I don't there's a thin line between doing that and being miserly. Everyone needs to have a goal for themselves for how much "enough" is, work towards it while still living their lives (even if the goal is asymptotic)
> it would take you about 26 years to make your first million dollars
Try again. In 26 years your $1 million in today's money is worth $526,235 assuming 2.5% inflation, and is easily vanquished in the U.S. with any major health emergency. On an average salary you'd have to save and invest 40-50% of your income to have any sort of meaningful effect long term and even then you have to hope you don't hit any unexpected emergencies. The penalty in the US for being poor is to pay more for everything and always be poor. The privilege for being rich in the US is to pay less for everything and always be rich. There is no upwards economic mobility via savings on an average salary in the US. Not even close. The only path to serious wealth in the US is by owning a ridiculous amount of capital, typically by birth-lotto, and leasing its usage.
The idea is to expose the 64-bit instruction set and registers, but keep memory and pointers per-process 32-bit as most apps use less than 4 GB of memory.
Although the Soviets certainly were mass murderers before WW2 and British and USA still sided with them.
Hitler was elected under the pretense that he represented socialism that was friendlier to the middle class and workers. This way people could get their socialist improvements to the economy (which was shit due to bad world-wide economy and war reparations) while still having defense against the the sort of upheaval and murderous destruction that the Reds represented.
The take-home lesson of WW2 shouldn't be that 'The other side was evil and we won'. Because the entire Eastern half of Europe and most of Asia was submitted to governments that were incredibly evil due to the Soviet victory.
WW2's lessons are meaningless without WW1. They really are effectively the same war. The treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of the German civilian government are directly responsible for the rise of power of the Fascism in Germany.
The take-home lesson of the 20th century wars is that massive murder and atrocities are only possible because people obey their governments. That 'The people' cannot discern true evil running the state until it's far too late.
Because evil doesn't show up saying "Elect me because I want to gas the Jews". They gain power by promising what you want. By telling you what you want to hear. And once they gain power then it is the average person's willingness to obey authority and carry out orders is what turns shoe makers, engineers, and doctors into mass murderers.
Which is the sort of thing that is happening in many parts of China.
Always remember that in Vichy France when they rounded up the Jews for the holocaust it wasn't the Germans troops that went around arresting them. It was the French police that rounded up people to be put on those trains. It was under the order's of the French politicians. This problem of obeying governments is not something that is limited by national borders.
The entire deal was put together in secret within the last 2 months. We don't know what anyone else would have offered because no one else was given the chance.
It's like that 'some guy' selling his classic car to a classic car dealer who was walking by, without first testing the price with experts or posting an advertisement.
Except in this case the "some guy" is selling the classic car without actually owning it since it actually belonged to a public museum, and the dealership was just set up last week by the former director of the museum who just happened to retire the week before that.
There seems to be some kind of breach of fiduciary trust here somewhere, heads should roll at ICANN even if all of this was somehow not in violation of any laws.
Valuation of a cashflow is a very well understood thing. There is literally a button on my calculator that just does it. And a built-in function in Excel.
It's ok to say that you don't really know for a fact and that you are just making assumptions. It doesn't mean you are wrong. It just means that you don't have anything backing your opinion.
The claims that nuclear has been "misregulated into a pulp" and that new designs can be economically developed which are much better than 20 and 30 year old designs, are also evidence free opinions.
