Communism

I think that's debatable. Personally, I went to university and had a great time there. Apart from learning, that phase of my life had lots of events, parties and spending time with friends. I always saw it as a priviledge that I had the opportunity to gather so much knowledge. Especially as school and university are paid for by the state where I live.

When I said no one, I didn’t mean literally zero people. I’m sure if you announced a project to launch a manned spacecraft into the sun you’d get people volunteering for the suicide mission. What I meant is that you’ll never get enough people to do it based on personal interest alone.

For every person like you who loved studying engineering in school (with all the 7 course per semester schedules, insane 8 hour days in classes plus 40+ hours of homework, “hell week” of nonstop midterms, and brutal “weed-out” final exams) there’s going to be thousands of others who just won’t bother because the pay is no better than what a janitor makes. Heck, why not study philosophy or medieval history instead?

And then when you get past school you get to the real problem: many of the jobs in these fields are incredibly dull. People might go to aerospace engineering school with big dreams of designing the next Concorde jet, yet find themselves doing nothing but paperwork review for Boeing. You think the Boeing safety scandals are bad enough in today’s capitalist world where the company is motivated by profit and the engineers are highly paid? Try getting anyone to take safety seriously when you pay everyone the same so there’s no real disincentive to avoid getting fired.

And that’s the other elephant in the room with engineering. In civil engineering the lead engineer has to sign off (and stamp with their professional seal) the plans for a project. If the building later collapses that engineer can be held criminally responsible (and face jail time) should the design be deemed unsafe by the investigation. Without paying the lead engineer any more than a junior engineer, how are you going to get anyone to accept that personal risk on themselves for no compensation whatsoever?

This applies to many other critical jobs where health and safety are on the line. Similarly for jobs where the worker is risking their own life. If you can’t compensate them for this additional personal risk (financial, criminal, or life and limb) then you’re going to have a very hard time finding people to take the job.

The other side of the coin is that some jobs will become extremely popular just because they are more fun to do. Since you can’t pay these folks any less to do the fun jobs, you’ll have a hard time deciding who is allowed to do the fun stuff and who gets stuck with the boring/dirty/dangerous/disgusting/undesirable jobs.

For example, actuarial science was a very popular major to study at my university. The field is competitive to get into and highly paid. However the job itself has a very high turnover due to people voluntarily choosing to leave! The work is so damn boring that even with high pay they can’t convince people to stay! With low pay the problem is going to be even worse. You’re going to have to lower the bar to let less intelligent/skilled people into the job but that is not likely to turn out well because the job is very technical to begin with.