[williamDafoe]

The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...

[tehjoker]

Some would say you educate people to cultivate an engaged citizenry

[lisper]

Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.

Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.

[eirikbakke]

Nations with high GDP tend to be service economies. Service professions tend to require good reading and writing skills, and often a college-level specialization. (No need for PhDs, though, except for scientists.)