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Why the fuck does it cost money to get smarter??
(aussie.zone)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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It's still free. You're not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials. No one is stopping you from going to the library and learning. The internet hosts a large wealth of knowledge.
I'm ready for those downvotes, but it's just a hardpill to swollow
I would argue that primarily youre paying for the recognition of your education, as in your diploma, which is often what employers look at.
Sure. Depends on what exactly. A teacher should have a formal education, backed by a paper while say a tradesperson should have informal hands-on training. (just saying for an employment hiring stand point)
I guess what I'm saying is: if you think that learning is strictly at the institution level, you are missing out on things that aren't taught.
I don't disagree at all, Information has always been out there for those who seek it out, the problem lies within capitalism, which only values education that has been paid for.
Often jobs will require a degree and experience, even trades that you say require informal training often require some sort of red seal or at least have an apprenticeship program.
You can get that education however you like, but its a bit more difficult to find an employer in a labour flooded market that is willing to let you prove your knowledge if you don't have the recognition to back it up.
The education isn't any less fruitful, but it is just valued less by the ruling class simply because it didn't require money.
You're ignoring safety.
Last thing I want is a Civil Engineer who's not been properly vetted.
We have enough facility failures even with civil engineering certs. Imagine if it was more cavalier.
That's a super good point!!
Most employers won’t actually check, just lie and say you have the degree if you’re confident you have the knowledge
Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation.. often employers don't give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.
Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it's own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.
A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.
No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.
Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they're still paying off the loans. And they are.
that is true, , but its harder to fake something like biotech experience than programming, or coding, because you can simply catch up on your free time. some people are afraid lying. i followed a person from a university that was in my class on Linkedin before they enshittified the site. every semester he was adding 1+years of experience for every semester he was still in the school,. he was definitely bullshitting his resume to a job.
Oof....not looking good for my case 😂
Institution based learning is unbelievably more effective though. Professional educators, structured courses and external reviews of ones learning are not only helpful, for higher levels of education they are vital. No amount of going to the library will make you a surgeon or an engineer or a scientist.
Not denying that. But there is more knowledge found than at a university. My arguement was that you are paying the teacher whom has first hand experience they can share to their students, not strictly education itself.
And you believe the burden of that payment should be placed on the young and uneducated?
Not sure where you thought I was implying that
Institution based learning also creates a bunch of barriers primarily because "learning" is not the main purpose of a modern university.
Those "professional educators" are often researchers moonlighting as educators, experts on their field, but rarely in addition to education. Their metrics are also not how well is material "taught" but to achieve a standard distribution of grades which can result in some real perverse incentives.
Those "structured courses" have the same fundamental design flaw of primary education. They aren't designed primarily for learning, they're designed for factory work and obedience.
That's not touching on the more critical part of financial incentives and how financial strain, and excessive amounts of stress in general, is not conducive to a learning environment.
Source: self made electric engineer thanks to the library and the dump.
Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a "field house" built in the 40's and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.
60+ years later, it's all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias "dining halls" now.. and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.
Thing is, it's been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.
The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.
This is part of why I've been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen's program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they're 20.
And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it's gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.
Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980..
not everyone can become a tradesperson, or want to. plus they dont want thier back/body to be broken by the time they are 30s or 40s. and its only ever available to 1-2 demographic anyways, they make the majority.
thats why women make up 60% of bio majors now, far surpassing men, and getting into grad studies, mostly being nurses, or health related jobs. or even MD, rarely BIOTECH/bio research. although its skewed this way because theres also systems in place to help women more than men.
Tell me you don't understand the Trades, w/o telling me you don't understand the trades.
I'm 60 this year, went through menopause over 15 years ago and have no arthritis or back issues whatsoever. This isn't 1850.
In 45 years of being in the Trades, the heaviest thing I've had to lift has been 5 gallon buckets of paint.
In the Trades, one doesn't have to worry about lifing a person out of a bed either. I've known nurses that have fucked their backs doing just that.
Anyone can be in the Trades, and the risk of AI building a house is far less than it is for AI to design some new molecule.. and given that President Stephen Miller is chasing the undocumented construction labor out of the country, it's a field ripe for women to enter into and make great coin, and have almost limitless work.
Ask me how I know.
i was giving you and other benefit of the doubt explaining thier side of the story
This is exactly right. There are countless free classes on coursera, edx and Harvard for free. And read. Read real books, daily. A degree costs money because it’s proof of learning. In theory. It really isn’t, of course, because most US universities are diploma mills.
It's not a hard pill to swallow. You're ignoring that not everyone learns by reading a book. Some people learn be performing actions, some learn by observing instructors. Just because the way that works for you is free doesn't mean that everyone has access to that.
Right, which is why you are paying for education. You pay for the instructor's knowledge and hands on approach. You're not paying for the information itself, rather the experience someone else is taking time to show you.
You can get books free on how to build a log cabin. Thousands of settlers built their own cabin, but they had the knowledge. If they didn't they paid for someone to teach them or build it for them. Not too much different now
You're not actually saying anything useful here.
While it is true that the desire to acquire knowledge comes from within, you're utterly disregarding how lack of access to educators, equipment, facilities, etc., can slow down or halt individual progress.
You've also disregarded some rather serious regulatory issues; I don't go to self-taught doctors, and don't want self-taught engineers designing my bridges and airplanes.
I'm saying education doesn't always equal a degree.
Yes, some fields should have formal education, but what people pay is not for the education, it's the experience of the instuctors, tools, class material, ect. Those are what we are paying for
Tl;dr: you posted a banal platitude with a definite implication, and are now being made to walk back and diminish the scope of the intellectual turd you dropped.
Both you, and everyone else reading this understands that my summary is accurate.
We all know this to be true, as you literally invited it with your first message:
What a fucking lame way to get your dopamine.