More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

> If people really cared about letting disadvantaged students go to college

> If you just took away the guarantee on the loans, and made them dischargable in bankruptcy, colleges would be forced to compete on price again

You'd also see many people couldn't afford college because they wouldn't be approved for the loan without the federal guarantee. I feel like the solution is universal education, we dance around it because it's not politically feasible but it's the solution. Set some rules around who can attend (grades, testing, etc). Setting reimbursement rates will control costs (like Medicare does). Force the universities to collect from the government (like hospitals do). Force 'quality control'/compliance on education standards (also expected of hospitals).

> It also builds professional networks

You know what else builds professional networks? Working and interacting with the real world.

There is truth to your jaded view, you can't just pay money to live on easy street. I had peers who just copied other peoples homework or other similarly self defeating behavior. They paid for education and chose not to get any. The paper degree doesn't have any value at all. It is the pain and agony of sipping on the firehouse of knowledge and the quite literal shared trauma of the whole experience that are the indicators of value.

The most important lesson I learned in college is just because something feels right doesn't mean it is. Just about everything has deep complexity and nuance. If I am not studied in a field, I am probably drawing conclusions from a place of ignorance.

Education is about suppressing our animal natures in order to have a better, more direct, more correct understanding of reality. Education is about destruction of delusions through systematic inquiry and critical thinking. Good education doesn't tell you what to think, but how to think, how to question yourself. It explains why things are the way they are. It is one thing to say "we stand on the shoulders of giants." But it is truly an experience to actually see the giants that we stand on.

Once you spend time outside of the US you learn about the value of education. You learn about high trust vs low trust societies. You learn that people with simple views of the world produce poverty and strife. Educated people outside of the US want to immigrate to the US because of our educated population. They want to escape the consequences of their poorly educated neighbors. The mark of an uneducated person is that they think they are experts in fields they are not. Educated peopled don't want to be around that. Educated people don't want to be ruled by that. Educated people want to be around other educated people.

Before you indict college education, I would encourage you to visit several poor countries and ask yourself why they are the way they are. It's obviously not as simple as poor education, but thinking about how education relates to poverty at a societal level and how education influences a society from a systemic perspective might improve your opinion of education.

I took an engineering path, but when I think back on what I value from my education, it's not the technical training.

I was handed opportunities I never would have had otherwise, access to some of the top experts in the world, and freedom proportional to the level of responsibility I took. College was the first time in my life I was ever around peers or people I considered smarter than myself.

I am sad that your experience with education has produced the grim view of education being purely functional, I believe college is truly what you make of it.

Having been a victim of this type of fraud, I'd say definitively worse than arguably. There's no legal recourse, ITT tech showed the world you have to be able to afford lawyers for 15+ years, and even then you can only come to a settlement (not a verdict).

GE required physics at all of our local community colleges were structured so the pass rate was 12% one of those years. If student's can't pass without being academically dishonest, regardless of merit, its just state sponsored fraud.

I did not claim that I could make it happen. I claimed that it was possible.

Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.

The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.