• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Is education expensive?

Grand Mal said:
Depends on the online source, too. If your field is, say, early childhood education, do you think your education is better served by online sources or classroom instruction and discussion with others in your field?
Click to expand...
I think that, for the many folks who cannot take 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree, sites like Kahn University are better than nothing. Hell, I even occasionally get enlightened in This forum.
 
coyote505 said:
I think that, for the many folks who cannot take 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree, sites like Kahn University are better than nothing. Hell, I even occasionally get enlightened in This forum.
Click to expand...
Better than nothing, yeah. That's been my experience too.
But no substitute for a university environment.
 
Grand Mal said:
Better than nothing, yeah. That's been my experience too.
But no substitute for a university environment.
Click to expand...
Closest you may be able to get, if U. is unaffordable, might be a book club for intellectuals. Also, nothing to prevent you from hanging out at the student union, if there's one close, and striking up friendships there. Student hours are sufficiently weird that you can probably find folks there on what ever schedule fits you.

I understand that St. John's College, a pretty elite place, has taken up distance learning. I have no idea what the cost is.
 
coyote505 said:
Closest you may be able to get, if U. is unaffordable, might be a book club for intellectuals. Also, nothing to prevent you from hanging out at the student union, if there's one close, and striking up friendships there. Student hours are sufficiently weird that you can probably find folks there on what ever schedule fits you.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your input but when I was university aged I was otherwise inclined. It's just now, in my old age, that not having gotten educated is a regret. Actually, thinking now, it's foolish to wish I was someone else back then.
But my point is the university environment has been valuable since universities were first established and online sources of information can, well, inform you but they can't educate you. Not the way discussion and interaction that works your mind can educate you.
 
My first college degree cost me approximately $5,000. Over forty years it helped me earn over $2 million. That same degree today costs $50,000 at the same school. And it will still earn about $2 million over forty years.

So, IMO, a college degree is a lot more expensive over the past half century. It outstripped overall inflation by a factor of 20.
 
1. Learning & Education is free, but certifying that you're educated (as in degrees and certs) can be expensive.
2. Some subjects you can be self-educated. Others have require formal coursework. Subjects that have their own nomenclature, standards and notations are very difficult to learn on your own because nothing is described in plain English. Examples include medicine, advanced math, quantum physics, etc.
 
aociswundumho said:
“The best investment you can make is in yourself.” -- Warren Buffett
Click to expand...
Yeah, Warren is successful. People who educate themselves with free online courses might be able to win a few rounds of a TV gameshow, but that's typically all they can do with the knowledge.
 
Having a clear curriculum and certification matter. Nonetheless, there are ways that the MOOCs are implementing these, and colleges are in a very precarious position. Specifically:
  • Colleges grow ever more expensive and ever less competent due to the increasing hierarchy of American society. Administrators, full time faculty, part time faculty, teaching assistants ... in the end the students are often being taught by people without experience, while they have to pay in some cases the wage, per capita, equivalent to one administrator specifically for them. This is a progressive, fatal disease: all the administrators are busy, right now, coming up with ways to hire more levels of administrators. And moving faculty out of offices to accommodate them.
  • Colleges have effectively "died" (lost homeostasis) due to political correctness and anti-correctness - the demise of free speech, the belief that finding one stray nasty sentence by someone is reason enough to banish them from college and perhaps send them to a Camp in El Salvador. The social life is strained, pretentious; the connections careerist, conniving. Fear destroys the collegiality a college needs to be a college. Of course, some groups continue to function more organically, but that's not a united enterprise.
  • Students have lost their prudence. With expression vilified, random and illegal action seems more tolerable. The Trumpists have some legitimate reason to criticize - we've seen the fires, the physical confrontations. Students who, despite supposedly being leaders in communication, see no better way to stake out their position than to play homeless person in the campus quad. It's hard to appreciate how far this has fallen without considering some of the great rallies of the original Civil Rights era. I mean, right after a terrorist bombing of children, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, in a crowd so mannerly, so dignified, so respectful, so steeped in the ethos of good people in a churchyard, that it was possible for organizers to drive a car straight through that dense crowd, confident that the people would part to make way for it in a systematic way, each looking out for the other.
  • Free online resources are cutting in. It is possible to use a free textbook (OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology 2e) that follows all of the HAPS learning objectives used by the old $300 textbooks. And because it's free, there are free lectures you can watch online (GHC Anatomy and Physiology) which cover those better than many novice lecturers. There are still a few ways for a lecturer to remain relevant, but they grow rarer. There are still ways for a tutor to remain relevant, but perplexity.ai can answer many questions just as well and far more accessibly.
  • Colleges have doubled as research institutions, but now the federal government seems viciously opposed to research of all sorts. So the budget is drying up. And colleges have been international students, but the international students have now been held hostage and may not be returning at all.
  • Colleges have lost their nerve and self-respect. They no longer really believe in their heart what they do is valuable. Consider New York University, which just made a huge deal out of denying a diploma to a student who simply said a couple of sentences about __. (a very touchy topic, Not To Be Mentioned Even Here) But what the student said is said in the news every single day. News sites don't worry about losing even a cent per impression. That student talked to perhaps 300 people, so to my ears the college told the world its diploma was worth less than three dollars.
  • There is also the ethical conundrum. Colleges tell students not to buy term papers or test answers, but they hold transcripts for ransom if the student is behind on payments - which is an identical sort of academic dishonesty. They tell students not to use AI but they use AI themselves. They don't like it when people fake unofficial transcripts to apply for a job, but they reserve the right to revoke a degree because of some politics they got mad about.
Free online education will not get the respect it deserves until people pursuing it develop themselves as a culture. They have to find ways to work in groups, compare notes, exchange strategies, develop an ecosystem of tutors and advisors beyond the mechanical interface. They'll start inventing college all over again. The brick on the balance will be the AIs and the need to certify familiarity with AI for jobs you have to know how to use AI to get, when (for applications outside the original computer science) the colleges in large part have basically no more idea what they're doing than any self-taught poser on Coursera. So I think we're headed toward a crash-and-burn scenario: empty, ruined universities and subversive groups of people learning at a relatively low level. I do hope it isn't as bad as that...
 
bythoughts said:
  • Colleges grow ever more expensive and ever less competent due to the increasing hierarchy of American society. Administrators, full time faculty, part time faculty, teaching assistants ... in the end the students are often being taught by people without experience, while they have to pay in some cases the wage, per capita, equivalent to one administrator specifically for them. This is a progressive, fatal disease: all the administrators are busy, right now, coming up with ways to hire more levels of administrators. And moving faculty out of offices to accommodate them.
  • Colleges have effectively "died" (lost homeostasis) due to political correctness and anti-correctness - the demise of free speech, the belief that finding one stray nasty sentence by someone is reason enough to banish them from college and perhaps send them to a Camp in El Salvador. The social life is strained, pretentious; the connections careerist, conniving. Fear destroys the collegiality a college needs to be a college. Of course, some groups continue to function more organically, but that's not a united enterprise.
  • Students have lost their prudence. With expression vilified, random and illegal action seems more tolerable. The Trumpists have some legitimate reason to criticize - we've seen the fires, the physical confrontations. Students who, despite supposedly being leaders in communication, see no better way to stake out their position than to play homeless person in the campus quad. It's hard to appreciate how far this has fallen without considering some of the great rallies of the original Civil Rights era. I mean, right after a terrorist bombing of children, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, in a crowd so mannerly, so dignified, so respectful, so steeped in the ethos of good people in a churchyard, that it was possible for organizers to drive a car straight through that dense crowd, confident that the people would part to make way for it in a systematic way, each looking out for the other.
  • Free online resources are cutting in. It is possible to use a free textbook (OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology 2e) that follows all of the HAPS learning objectives used by the old $300 textbooks. And because it's free, there are free lectures you can watch online (GHC Anatomy and Physiology) which cover those better than many novice lecturers. There are still a few ways for a lecturer to remain relevant, but they grow rarer. There are still ways for a tutor to remain relevant, but perplexity.ai can answer many questions just as well and far more accessibly.
  • Colleges have doubled as research institutions, but now the federal government seems viciously opposed to research of all sorts. So the budget is drying up. And colleges have been international students, but the international students have now been held hostage and may not be returning at all.
  • Colleges have lost their nerve and self-respect. They no longer really believe in their heart what they do is valuable. Consider New York University, which just made a huge deal out of denying a diploma to a student who simply said a couple of sentences about __. (a very touchy topic, Not To Be Mentioned Even Here) But what the student said is said in the news every single day. News sites don't worry about losing even a cent per impression. That student talked to perhaps 300 people, so to my ears the college told the world its diploma was worth less than three dollars.
  • There is also the ethical conundrum. Colleges tell students not to buy term papers or test answers, but they hold transcripts for ransom if the student is behind on payments - which is an identical sort of academic dishonesty. They tell students not to use AI but they use AI themselves. They don't like it when people fake unofficial transcripts to apply for a job, but they reserve the right to revoke a degree because of some politics they got mad about.
Free online education will not get the respect it deserves until people pursuing it develop themselves as a culture. They have to find ways to work in groups, compare notes, exchange strategies, develop an ecosystem of tutors and advisors beyond the mechanical interface. They'll start inventing college all over again. The brick on the balance will be the AIs and the need to certify familiarity with AI for jobs you have to know how to use AI to get, when (for applications outside the original computer science) the colleges in large part have basically no more idea what they're doing than any self-taught poser on Coursera. So I think we're headed toward a crash-and-burn scenario: empty, ruined universities and subversive groups of people learning at a relatively low level. I do hope it isn't as bad as that...
Click to expand...
Welcome to DP. I look forward to seeing more of your comments. Very well thought out.
 
Free education is awesome for the curious and the self employed.

For the majority of those who need to convince an employer to hire them, not so much, until the perception of getting a free education is changed.
 
Grand Mal said:
Thanks for your input but when I was university aged I was otherwise inclined. It's just now, in my old age, that not having gotten educated is a regret. Actually, thinking now, it's foolish to wish I was someone else back then.
But my point is the university environment has been valuable since universities were first established and online sources of information can, well, inform you but they can't educate you. Not the way discussion and interaction that works your mind can educate you.
Click to expand...
I had 4 years college and 3 years law school. However some of the conversations I have had that "stretched my brain" were not on campus. Try lectures, if available, preferably with a chance to engage the lecturer afterward. You are also likely to meet fellow audience members with interesting viewpoints.
 
The outlook for U.S. colleges has become much worse since I posted my last comment. I'm now seeing reports that not merely are prospective students from outside the U.S. going to be subjected to AIs looking through everything they say online for something "objectionable", but that even the lack of social media presence will be taken as evidence against them. This leaves colleges either without foreign students at all, or with foreign students who have embraced a duty to serve - both abroad and in class - as a sort of Trump hasbara (Trumpsbara?) in order to have a chance at participating. And if the courts are not ready to step in with recollection of something called a constitution over this now, what chances do the American students have even after all the foreigners are gone?

By contrast, free online educational resources can be operated from anywhere in the world. American students could attempt to exercise some academic freedom by using end-to-end encryption to access them. (This is important because this isn't just international politics - global warming, even measles vaccine could be a dangerous topic, if not today then tomorrow) While I assume efforts will be made to frustrate Americans from trying to pay for foreign certifications, the business could be conducted via Bitcoin, which is absolutely protected from legal interference. I don't know how far this would go, because I can't even begin to evaluate how bad an inquisition done by AI can be.
 
Real blank said:
Do you not understand the question?
Click to expand...

I think I understand it, but without more context it requires making at least one inference. I’m going to take the question at face value and assume it’s speaking of “education” as a concept.

Is education expensive? It depends. Who’s paying? The person being educated, or someone else, like a benefactor or taxpayer? Who or what is doing the educating, and how? Because even public libraries aren’t free. The 2025 budget for the Library of Congress is almost $1 billion. Is that expensive? That’s a matter of subjective personal onion. If it were in the executive branch of government and not under the purview of Congress, DOGE might say fire all of the librarians, digitize everything, and let AI run it. Keep the books and documents worth keeping in a climate-controlled archive, and give away or destroy everything else.
 
Ahlevah said:
Keep the books and documents worth keeping...
Click to expand...
The whole principle of the Library of Congress is that ALL books are worth keeping. And if you're going to keep them, why not keep them where people can access them? A chunk of their budget is already for digital resources, and some of it is also designated simply to keep their historic buildings in good order. What else would you use such a building for, except to keep books in?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom