this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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In my mind, if a company wants to set a generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans. Otherwise it's using the education system as a subsidized training program.
Note I said generalized. Engineers, doctors, etc who desire to ever be employed can't stop at a bachelor's anyways. Even still, their employees should have to pick up their training tab.
Business has gotten a free pass for 40 years and look at the society they've created with it. Maybe civilization needs more than a love of money to sustain it. Crazy huh.
This would make getting a job out of college SO MUCH HARDER. Companies would do everything the could to get existing employees in the workforce, for whom someone else has already paid off their loan.
Much like cell phone carriers locking you into a contract, companies would try to force you to work for them for X number of years because they paid your loans. I suppose this could work similar to vesting, so it wouldn’t be impossible. But companies would still try very hard not to hire anyone with student loans. It would just benefit the wealthy people who don’t need them.
Much easier to just raise business taxes by enough to pay for free education at all levels.
Tax based upon the average education level required for the job in the industry. This would change them all to a skills based hiring system overnight.
I guess the real answer is government subsidized college.
Free college.
An investment in the future through rigorous and accessible education.
And/or lower the costs of education. A lot of college seems tribal or even wasteful for the cost currently
This is how it has to start in the US. Subsidizing free college in other countries is much easier because colleges there keep their costs under control, focusing on education and research over the "college experience", so the costs per student of running said colleges is much lower. There is SO much wasteful spending, brought about by the greed of many US colleges for the near unlimited flow of student loan money coming from lenders especially prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, that can be thrown out to cut those costs.
Not to mention that fewer people in free college countries actually attend a university, with education systems in those countries designed to steer many students towards places like trade/ag/other schools if they show aptitude in areas they really don't need a 4-year degree for or really just don't meet the academic standard to get into those universities. Millennials and Gen Z were all told in the US that we HAD to go to college to get anywhere in the world and we were all pushed in that direction whether it was a good direction for us or not. Now there's a big labor shortage here in the trades and other blue collar jobs because so few younger people have the proper skills, which aren't really taught in four-year institutions, or the desire to take on the training or effort to gain those skills. Fewer students spending four years in an expensive university and more in two-year schools or trade schools has the advantage of both lowering overall education costs and providing a workforce with more diverse skills, regardless of the time needed to train them.
You know, when the concept of publicly funded education was proposed, it was considered revolutionary and not well supported by some, who didn't like the idea of the costs.
We currently have K-12 in US that's publicly funded education. This idea would essentially just make that K-16.
This video regarding education has always been one of my favorites: https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms
I'm not disagreeing with you. I would submit that this is already true for other reasons. Speaking specifically of IT or INFOSEC fields, companies currently have extremely high expectations or experience requirements/desires.
This has been a problem for the INFOSEC field where there's a shortage, but companies don't want to hire entry level candidates with little to no experience. They want reasoned, veteran INFOSEC practitioners, which there isn't enough of.
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I like that you both brought this up. There's a real life example of this in the US military. It's a well known benefit/incentive for military service that they would fund your college education if you work for them long enough. You signed your service contract, but if you met that, you got your education for 'free' if you want to call it that. It's a little different in you might be killed in a stupid political war along the way, but it shows that the idea is practical and can work.
I guess if I had the choice of being hired at a really decent company and they would fund some highly sought after training as long as I gave them a reasonable number or years of employment with reasonable compensation, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
On the other had, the SyFi fan that I am, I could see a bit of a dystopian future where you have to belong to companies for a while to start off in life. If you consider that people now start off in massive student loan dept, the dystopian ownership is currently banks while people take up to 20+ years to repay student loans.
Personally, I think education should be free to all, rich or poor, as its the summation of the human experience thus far.
Or in other words, it's our birthright
No one should have the right or ability to paygate it, and that includes the state. The labs necessary should be publically funded because society would suffer more for having less physicists and chemists than an abundance of them, for reasons I hope are obvious.
True. Even though many will argue against this citing the 'practicalities' involved, this is just another instance of long vs. short term investment (in general, not just financial terms). Long term investment (like free education and state funded science) is supposed to be harder and more costly in the short term, because the payoff comes later, but it is much higher and leads to a healthier system, making things easier, incuding more investment. Whereas short term is usually damaging to the system and makes things harder long term.
I really like the saying that an idealist is a realist (or pragmatist) just using a longer timeline.
Engineers in the US regularly stop at the bachelor's level.
Yup, in the office we regularly hire engineers and scientists with a bachelor's, I've never seen anyone even care what tier of bachelor's. Some people go on to get licensed or a master's on the company dime but we also have lots of unlicensed never going back to school people in very technical demanding and high ranking positions.
I'm just a geologist with a bachelor's and am regularly supervising and training people with engineering PhDs. My work place quickly becomes task specific and degrees are worth less than years in the field a lot of the time, your mileage may vary.
Or, you know, get some state-funded free college education like most other civilized countries other than the US, so you actually do not end up with $100k student loans like a dumbass.
I'm with ya man, if cost weren't a deterrent I'd hold multiple doctorates right now.
I think that just makes new grads (with loans) unemployable