Education tends toward public good will if the mission is to educate and improve learning outcomes.
I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I do agree there's money in discretionary learning. Music, dance, knitting, sports, you name it. In the scheme of things it seems niche. I don't intend to diminish the value of humans learning things.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience. Going through college by only kind of attending class and doing only the required work and exams, yeah the whole thing might feel like a scam, I could see that. But attending office hours, taking interesting gym classes, auditing a random class in a peripheral interest, involvement in clubs, and many other side quests will elevate that experience significantly.
If that were the only thing, yeah I could see it being a hard sell.. especially as costs have gotten a lot higher than when I went to university at the beginning of the millennium. But add in the peer network and the ease of making friends because of repeated random encounters.. and I think it's still worth it.
The whole "companies expect a degree, at least to show that you can finish a multi-year effort" was always an afterthought for me.
> I think a lot of people underestimate the most valuable resource at universities: the access to specialized experts who love to talk with a curious and interested audience.
You can get that access without paying tuition. Just show up and talk to the professors. They (most likely) won't kick you out.
If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
However...
At least in the olden days, going to the class and listening to the professor's take on the subject could help you make connections that you wouldn't make in another context, or on your own. In current days, maybe you make those connections by watching YouTube videos. I (vaguely) remember a very interesting post by someone who said when they watched Talk Y at 2x speed, it seemed mediocre, but later they watched it at 1x and started making all sorts of connections from it.
I think that's one of the benefits of college. Experiencing life at 1x, with time to make the connections and do the creative thinking.
The creativity can also come from talking with your colleagues (fellow students).
> If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
No, I mean you can literally read the same books and attend the same lectures as tuition paying students.
You can ask a professor if you can sit in class (even if you are not a student). Most will be overjoyed that someone is actually sitting in class just to _learn_, instead of just for the piece of paper at the end.
Yep, not disputing the data. Seems we agree: the premise is people go to college with the expectation of higher earning power. The product is earning power, less so "learning", but we don't have to argue semantics.
Now the more controversial stance is we can't say this earning power is causal. That's why specifically I said people buy the gateway ticket into these higher earning jobs. It's self-perpetuating.
I can't disagree with the data, what I can say is people that out-earn non-college people is not _because_ of college. The population represented by non-college goes really down really deep for large variety of socio-economic reasons let's just say.
College sells the forever student to a niche industry of E-learning Publishers, Special Interests (Thought Reform), and Student Loan Debt Servicers, limiting Alumni at the government's expense.
