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[quote=Anonymous]Most people shouldn't go to college, only the top 25% of our population really needs to be highly educated IMO.

-For certain highly technical or specialized professions it's obviously very important to have the right education (doctors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, etc)
-For most jobs in our economy, a college degree only serves as a way for employers to filter candidates, it doesn't make the candidate more qualified on its own. A college degree is something that intelligent people tend to have but it doesn't make them intelligent.
-This pointless and expensive filter acts as a drain on the economy by a) forcing young people to shell out tens or hundreds of thousands on a useless degree and b) delays their entry into the workforce where they could be earning and saving money starting at 18 instead of 22+
-Most career relevant learning doesn't occur in college but instead on the job
-College rigor is very low these days and lots of the required EC courses are complete jokes, I was a CS major in college and took a bunch of easy ECs to fulfill a pointless liberal arts requirement where I probably read about 5% of the assigned material and still passed with A's/B's. Barely learned anything. These courses DO NOT enrich you, they are just ways for the university to milk students of money.
-College drop out rates are very high, around 30-40% of students who go to college never even graduate. This highlights the fact that most students aren't college material and can't even handle the dumbed down courses that we have today. 
-Universities have bloated budgets, they spend obscene amounts of money on things that contribute nothing to learning like sports, fancy new buildings, more admins, etc.
-The idea that EVERYONE needs to go to college paired with the ease of getting a student loan is why colleges can continue jacking up tuition every year since they know the gravy train of government money will never run out. This dynamic is almost ENTIRELY to blame for the student debt crisis. Stop handing out loans like candy and student debt/tuition will cease going up.
-Many students aren't even serious about studying and are only there to party, I don't have a problem with this but only if they do it on their own dime. We shouldn't allow dumb 18 year olds to borrow tens of thousands a year just to get drunk every weekend and eventually drop out. Huge numbers only enter college because of all the propaganda telling them they need to go, not because they're serious. A rite of passage shouldn't cost 200k and 4 years of your life.
-Even though I was in a technical field I still saw the diminishing returns of being a CS student for 4 years, I learned 80% of what I needed for my job the first 2 semesters, 90-95% within the first 4 semesters. I learned about as much in my first year on the job as a software engineer as I did in 4 years of college.

The college industry has become parasitical and is costing our country so much money with little to no gain for the majority of students. It's largely a waste of resources. I really don't think we would be worse off as a country if higher education enrollment took a 75% haircut, most intellectual achievement comes from a small number of people anyway (pareto principle). Someone with a middle of the bell curve IQ isn't going to benefit from going to school longer and we would all be better served if they entered the workforce at a younger age vs getting a degree to check off a box.[/quote]

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