General Discussion

[Velvet LeChance]

I was in talking in general about countries who offer subsidised third-level education. Though, saying that, there's plenty of Polish who emigrated out to Ireland during the boom. I couldn't give you exact figures, though.

[Musicman247]

Not everyone wants to relocate, though. So for every person who finds work elsewhere you'll have at least one other who stays where they are and contributes to the lessening of the value of their education.

We're seeing it in the US, too. A Bachelor's degree in many cases is not enough to differentiate yourself in the market. Many people opt to get their Masters to set themselves apart. The problem then is they have a Masters with no experience.

[Archer]

The problem starts in high school where they sat and told you, "Every single one of you needs to go to college."

[Moeboid]

It depends on how you look at it, really. If having a degree means that you're qualified to do a certain job, then you're still qualified no matter how many people have that degree. In that sense, the value is the same. If you're looking for a way to stand out, then sure, a degree has less potential to do that when more people have them. On top of that, I value being educated even when it doesn't lead to employment (or when it doesn't directly lead to employment). It's complex, but I generally believe that an educated population is a good thing to have.

I agree that it's a problem when a job market is saturated, but it's a problem that can be solved in a number of ways, and excluding students based on their economic status is not among the best of them.

I could say more, but I'll leave it there.

[Musicman247]

I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and I paid my own way through school working part-time jobs. Your economic status should not factor into whether you receive an education or not, but your drive to get that education, and the steps you take to get it should. Like dzio said, when something is free people value it less. When you work hard for what you have, you appreciate it more.

I could say more, but I'll leave it there.

[Velvet LeChance]

I'd like to repeat Ireland works on a point system. You have to do well (READ: work hard) in school (not Wal-Mart) to go to the top colleges. Graduates from the top colleges in turn tend to get hired quicker (in Ireland, anyway).

I'll similarity leave it there.

[dzio]

Okay, don't have time to explain in detail now, and I don't want to turn this into a serious debate about higher education, but I will say this:
1. In Poland if you graduate high school (which is very easy), you can get into some university. Not a very great one, with low grades, but pretty much everyone can get in somewhere. Better courses only accept graduates with high enough scores from certain subjects.
2. The system for financing universities is aimed at quantity, not quality. If you fail too many students, you don't get enough money, because money follows the student. Result - overcrowded lecture halls, not enough teachers to have any sort of personal contact, lowered standards to allow even morons to pass the exams.
3. Final result - what Musicman said - if everyone can get something and it's easy to get, it loses value. It is the problem of education being free, but not in the financial sense, but in the sense that now it doesn't cost you any real effort.

[Veck]

I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and I paid my own way through school working part-time jobs. Your economic status should not factor into whether you receive an education or not, but your drive to get that education, and the steps you take to get it should. Like dzio said, when something is free people value it less. When you work hard for what you have, you appreciate it more.

I hate to break it to you but jobs aren't particularly easy to come by nowadays.

[Kerr]

People at large being more educated isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing. Knowledge isn't just for an elite, it's for everyone. It used to be that not everyone could read and write, but now the majority of people in first world countries can. Being able to read no longer makes you "special" but that doesn't make widespread literacy bad.

[Avron the S'wit]

Actually, I kind of agree with MM, but not entirely the way he meant it. I always get into huge discussions about this with my friends, and I'm aware it's pretty elitist or whatever, but I really don't think that everyone should go into higher education just to get a degree. The fact of the matter is that knowledge is definitely for everyone and everyone should have free, unlimited access to knowledge at every stage of their life - there's no reason why they shouldn't or can't, particularly with today's technologies and the internet in particular. However, I don't think everyone necessarily needs a piece of paper to prove how smart they think they are. I'm a very serious academic and I absolutely hate it when I'm sitting in a class having my mind blown by how awesome the subject material is, and most of the people around me are dicking around on Facebook, their cell phones, or just sleeping through the lecture, then proceed to half-ass their way through the next however many years, get subpar grades and put in a subpar amount of work, and get a degree that puts them on an even playing field as me. When you add in that they're doing this on borrowed money from the government and their parents and have no excuse not to have the time to put in the work - compared to someone who, say, doesn't have any parents and had to work while in university and still managed to do exceptionally well - I think it's pretty fair to feel really frustrated and angry.

I think everyone should be entitled to knowledge. I don't think that everyone should be put on the same playing field when they didn't necessarily put the same amount of work into getting to that next step. It's very unfair, and then you flood the market with people who pretty much degrade the value of all that hard work. (As in, "Well, everyone has a BA now and they're not that special...") I was the first person in my family to go to university and I took it very seriously; a lot of people didn't. At the end of four years, though, we all look the same, and that's just wrong.

But, that's also just a product of culture sometimes. In the US, you are expected to go to university now even if you don't understand or appreciate why you are going. So very many students really don't see it as an opportunity and waste it away, and even worse the education system has failed them entirely and they aren't even prepared. I can't tell you how many people I saw at my undergraduate university, and even at the graduate level at a very prestigious institution, who didn't even possess the writing or logical thinking skills to compete on that level. It's really frustrating, and utterly bizarre to me that no one seems remotely interested in wanting to change this despite all the talking we do about education reform each year.

Pretty sad, really.

[dzio]

Avron just explained very eloquently what I meant when I said Poland has too many people going to university.

[Musicman247]

No, that's pretty much the way I meant it, Avron.

[Avron the S'wit]

In that case, spot on!

I think the problem is people equate a degree with knowledge. Like my bro John Adams said, "There are two types of education: one teaches you how to make a living; the other, how to live." Knowledge is for everybody. A degree, I think, is not. These days, unfortunately, a piece of paper does not always mean you're well educated in a matter, and when you devalue what that means, well, then you got some real problems.

[dzio]

Your bro is right, but I'd like to point out that this other type of education is also very important and ignoring it completely in favour of "education that teaches you how to live" screwed up Polish job market in the last decade.

[Moeboid]

Avron, students have to live up to the university's standards - which they are obviously doing, since they're passing - not your own. On top of that, I don't think it's fair to assume that the diligent students are always the best students. I feel safe in assuming that many brilliant people aren't diligent at all. I don't doubt that you're a good student, but whether you're better than the ones who sat around on Facebook during class is yet to be proven.

[Velvet LeChance]

So, he problem people seem to be having then is not the relative ease in which people are getting into university but the relative ease in which they're passing through it.

Or perhaps I'm misreading.

[Avron the S'wit]

I guess the problem, Moeboid, is that the universities in the US don't exactly have impeccable standards. You'd be surprised how little you need to actually pass here. At my undergraduate alma mater, as long as you had a C (and, in some cases, a D) on a sliding scale of F (the lowest) to A (the highest), you qualified for graduation. So, basically, if you failed every single test, passed one final (not even necessarily with an A), and showed up most of the time, you were considered a pass.

On our GPA scale, which goes up to 4.0, a C is a 2.0-2.5. And that's without even considering grade inflation or curves, which alter things. And my alma mater was considered a pretty good school, and ranks on the top 100 in the world.

I'm not saying it's a problem everywhere, but based on what I've seen (and see) here in the US, it's not about anyone living up to standards - it's about getting people, and most importantly, their money, through the system.

Edit: What I'm saying is, a person with a 2.5 GPA gets the same piece of paper as someone who gets a 3.0, a 3.8, or a 4.0, and then they all look the same in the job market. That's part of what I find frustrating.

[Velvet LeChance]

In Ireland if you average below a B you only get a pass degree instead of an honours one. And I'm pretty sure it states on your degree if you got into the A range, too (though, I could be wrong.)

[Avron the S'wit]

We had an honors system as well, where you could graduate Cum Laude or Summa Cum Laude (in addition to getting special distinctions, such as the Dean's List or one of two high ranking honor societies), but since there's debate over whether or not you earned it or if different educational majors even equate to the same amount of work - i.e., Does honors in an English major mean the same as honors in an Engineering major? - most of the time no one outside of academics even cares.

I had a family member flat out tell me that my graduating with prestigious honors and having done well didn't "mean much," since I graduated in linguistics. Which was absurd, because linguistics was actually a hard track.

[Taters]

That which requires the most intelligence to study tends to also be the stuff that is of "least value" to society and/or only of value to other scholars in that field. And it sucks.

[dzio]

@Velvet - I suppose we could have a system where almost everyone can get in, but you have to work very hard to stay, but I think a better system is the one where there are some entrance requirements that guarantee that you're not wasting a semester separating people who obviously can't deal with university-level education from those capable of putting in the neccessary effort and intelligent enough.

[Avron the S'wit]

Also, consider that (the huge, huge financial inaccessibility to a university degree in the US also withstanding) the dropout rate in the US is super high. Forty-six percent of higher education students, and 63% of African American students here, fail to graduate within six years. (Source, Huffington Post) Most bachelor's degrees take four.

This is kind of a complicated issue though, since it has to do with the economy, the price tag, and the failure to have proper college-level preparation in high school. Lots of kids get to the university level and have to take classes that don't count toward your degree or GPA just so they can be taught college-level skills. That's pretty insane, and I think that's a huge issue.

Edit: And if you don't graduate, you still have to pay back the borrowed money with interest. Even if you do graduate but the economy fails and you can't work, you still have to pay back the borrowed money with interest. So essentially, it's a super flawed system and lots of people are in a whole lotta debt.

[Velvet LeChance]

@Avron (on your earlier point): A Pass and Honours degree are completely different here. A Pass degree is what you get after completing three years in university. An Honours degree is what you get after completing four years in university. By averaging below a B in your final year you've essentially failed it.

My cousins year in College only had a handful of people actually get their honours degree. Everyone else basically wasted an entire year of their lives (though, saying that, some of the higher passes are allowed to resit the exams next Summer.)

@Avron (on your later point:) God bless Socialist Europe, right?

@Dzio: I think our point system works pretty well. Anyone who isn't bothered with education doesn't get in to one of the better courses and, in a lot of cases, fields. Medicine is basically Straight As and a high grade on a IQ (or similar, anyway) test, for example. It has it's flaws - as does any system - but otherwise I think it's pretty solid. EDIT: But you have a similar system don't you; so I doubt my input here really helps:/ EDIT2: The fault lies in secondary level education, perhaps.

[Musicman247]

From the Xbox One thread.

What the hell is that?

Your childhood must have been horrible.

Actually my childhood was amazing. Original Tranformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, and those are just the action figures

[HatofMadness]

Musicman is just slow bro. Don't fret