To be more precise, the lower ramblings apply less to:
Broadly speaking and with many exceptions, if the school does not say what task precisely you will be able to do after graduating, leave.
If you can:
school is not necessary. If both criteria can be achieved, going to schools will handicap your progress. The equivalent of signing up to a sprint with this guy.
A lot of engineering effort has gone into reducing the amount of energy lost in power systems. Those people have done some miracles in the recent decades. At the same time, schools have made their transfer as shitty as possible and continue to break that benchmark year after year. Instead of trying to make people more educated, they end up making them dumber, when we consider the opportunity cost.
Let's say you walk into a room with 100 people and your task for the next 4 years is to learn one thing from each person. After you do that, a couple of years pass and you find that only 4 of the learned facts were kind of useful. Kind of.
Does this sound like progress? Does 1 useful fact per year sound like a great return on investment? Remember that you also paid cash to get into that room. Will you generate it back from those 4 facts you learned there?
People have this problem / fallacy of correlating the effort put into a task with the value of the output.
The more hard it is to do something, the more valuable it is.
Thus, people who know this can abuse it quite easily. Examples of this may include:
That doesn't mean that doing those tasks makes them useful, if the only thing that changes after them is a value in database.
In most cases, the input energy will go nowhere. And this is what most schools are doing:
Give them hard tasks to do, so that they feel like they're doing something useful.
A lot of corporations / businesses can be seen as being in either two stages:
At the start of the lifecycle, the only possible way of surviving is by creating an immense amount of value for its customers. This can be labeled as the startup + growth stage. Once you have accumulated a non-trivial amount users and have sprinkled in some vendor lock-in, you can start to increase the fees year by year and squeeze out more profits, without increasing the value of the product.
The growth stage can be fast, while the steady decline phase can be 20x longer. This doesn't mean that the company can't provide any value during the steady decline, but the overall quality does start to get worse on a yearly basis.
The extent of value extraction could be based on the size of the corporation. The bigger the company (Oracle), the more bad stuff you can get away with. And it's not too hard to see when companies switch to that phase.
Breaking out of the Value Extraction phase is extremely hard, because you need both:
The last time I checked, there were no best-selling books that were written by a committee, so in most cases this is the job of a single individual (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk type of people).
From what I've seen, most schools (that are not in the previously mentioned categories of education sectors) are in the n-th year of Value Extraction. They might have been useful 50 years ago, but in this age, they can get away with some really bad stuff with no real consequences.
As an analogy, there was a brief period where youtubers where mentioning how much time was spent watching one of their videos, like
Oh my god, the total watch time for video X was 35 thousand hours!
While in theory this sounds like a lot, these numbers are a drop in the ocean when you do the same math for how much time people spend on a useless 4 year degree.
This also means that we potentially could be at a point, where if 70% of schools disappeared, the overall intelligence level would not decrease. This might not be an outrageous statement.
There is quite a big problem with the "Go to school so that you could get hired" mentality. If you go to school, finish it and your answer to the question "What can you do now, with the stuff that they taught you there?" is "Nothing", then what actual value do you bring to someone else? What skills do you have if you can't do anything?
If you're going to school just to get the diploma, then that's all you're gonna get.
A common excuse (propaganda?) I hear from either the teachers or people who repeat the same excuse the teachers say is:
Yeah, but what if I learn this and it might be useful for someone somewhere for something at some point?!?
Which basically means that you're memorizing stuff for an exam (that you will forget in the next week), so that you're maybe ready when something maybe happens.
With this logic, I should maybe learn a little bit of Spanish, so that if I maybe get kidnapped by the cartel, I could maybe negotiate with them.
If you need to learn something only to pass an exam and won't use the learned information anywhere else after that, then that's a waste of time. Anyone who says differently is most probably a teacher who makes those exams.
If you spend 12 years of your life learning information that you will not use in any shape or form outside an exam, then in the background you start to attribute learning to being pointless. Can you really blame someone who doesn't want to learn anything new after some point? Not really. Are schools responsible if you can't get a job after graduating their school? Not really.
I do have to give some credit to schools. I mean... you can say to someone's face that they're gonna waste 4 years of their life going to some random university and after that they're probably not gonna get hired. They will kind of agree and then still go. If you know that something is a scam and still go there, then that's some next level stuff right there.
People who gave money to Bernie Madoff at least tought that they would get it back. If you give your time and money to a school, you already know that it's lost forever. In most cases.
On the bright side, we do live in one of the best times where most, if not all information is basically free. Want to learn how something works? There's probably a tutorial for it on youtube. There's even a lot of people who are willing to spend months creating educational material and giving it away for free on the internet. Available at any time.
If you want to know how something works, then you can learn it online.
The question is, will you have the motivation to do it, after schools completely fucked your association between learning and doing something useful after that?