You don’t think investing in arts, humanities, and music contributes to a functioning democracy?

Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.

A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.

> It's easy to make the argument:

And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.

There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.

Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.

Well, the way things are going, maybe it should be way more subsidized...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818544

https://archive.ph/94e7p

Right. And also, when you have paid $240k for that degree, don't write endless screeds complaining that the degree was a "scam" and that it's someone else's fault that you're not earning much with that degree.

Even in the 00s and 10s, there used to be people complaining bitterly that they have a lot of student loans after getting a degree in puppetry (seriously.) And the same people would have lit themselves on fire in a public square if they had been denied student loans for getting a puppetry degree.

I feel that you can't have it both ways: guaranteed student loans for any degree, no matter how impractical, and also complaining that some degrees funded with student loans don't lead to a lucrative career. Choose one or the other.

Collectively, yes, but not individually.

The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.