Student loans the fastest growing debt.
They are getting them younger.
The education can't be taken away, but you also can't pass it on to your heirs.
It is as ephemeral as it is inalienable.
worse than that, college provides students with
schooling, not education.
Any education may occur is purely accidental and contrary to the goal of producing well-schooled students.
There's a distressing amount of distrust of "education" in this thread sometimes. I have to say, aside from this community, higher-ed has, in my experience, been full of the most establishment-challenging people I've ever met. Granted, they tended to skew fiscal-liberal (youth and inexperience can do that), but nevertheless displayed honest and critical questioning of the status quo, over a pretty wide variety of thought.
That said, you may be specifically referring to K-12 public education in the US, in which case I'll offer no opinion because I have no personal experience with it.
regarding education:
Our whole school system is designed to turn people from random individuals into mutually interchangeable parts of a big machine. What is the first thing you learn in school? It's not reading, or writing or any of that stuff which your parents or their friends could have taught you by themselves if they weren't too busy being parts of the machine. It's that your time is not your own. It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the authorities who will tell you when to be at a certain place, doing certain things. Better get used to it kiddo, because it's going to be like that for the rest of your life!
Next thing you learn is that mistakes are bad. So bad in fact that it is preferable to do nothing than to make mistakes. Oh and don't bother thinking for yourself. There is exactly ONE correct answer to everything and we already have it so don't bother with that, just memorize these text books.
Btw I went to university. I was interested in the subject they were "teaching". What a huge pile of horse crap that was. I quit. Everyone told me I am crazy, without education I won't get a good job! Right. As if having a Job (acronym for "Just over broke") is the only way to get by in life. Anyway I told them they are crazy for wasting their best years in such a rotten institution. And they knew it was shit. But the momentum of the whole system just carried them further and they stayed, finished their schools, got into jobs and started turning into miserable zombies just as predicted. And the ones who actually stayed in school even further, turning themselves into academics? They were the worst of the bunch. Lifeless, bland individuals, without any original thought in their heads. Conforming to the standards of authority has become the alpha and omega and everything else takes the back seat. Except their bitter conviction that somehow they are relevant. That somehow the guy who spent his whole life in academia can teach businessmen about management.
