Doublespeak?

[ignoramus]

I've never understood why you pay to go to university just to get a job to pay for going to university

Like buying a car to get to work so you can pay for the car

Just stay the fuck home! It's the safest option!

[brewer]

I've never understood why you pay to go to university just to get a job to pay for going to university

Like buying a car to get to work so you can pay for the car

Just stay the fuck home! It's the safest option!

I tried that. Got fat, lazy, drunk and suffered a hell of a lot of friction burns.

[ignoramus]

I'm retiring soon so very looking forward to doing all those things!

(ps, ripping myself away from the sociopathic business partner is harder than trying to get the alien off my face.)

Lots of ugly and expensive legals involved! The bastard just won't let go!
Anyway, it's happened now, the contract is getting drawn up on my terms.
Either that or he loses his job and his wife's since I can now legally dissolve the company by June 30.

Sorry for all the bs, carry on.

[Fireball]

I've never understood why you pay to go to university just to get a job to pay for going to university

Like buying a car to get to work so you can pay for the car

Just stay the fuck home! It's the safest option!

I tried that. Got fat, lazy, drunk and suffered a hell of a lot of friction burns.

Try more lube.

---

How can one be 'overeducated'

You can be 'undereducated' but you can never have too much fucking education.  They should just say "Underemployed"

Indeed. I worked a few jobs after I got laid off in '91 where I was underemployed. The irony is that I have a B Sc in physics and worked next to electrical engineers who I had to repeatedly educate about the performance of antennas. Some of them had PhDs, so they kept their jobs while I was sliding down the razor blade of life. Oh well. Most of them are still working, but I'm retired. Last laughs and all, I guess.

[vulcanlogician]

The headline should read:
'leave university with a shite degree, expect a shite job'.

Until knowledge is applied to a real world situation it isn't very valuable.

I think there are two reasons an education may be deemed important. To me, a career is only one thing you ought to expect from an education. There are countless benefits to knowledge outside the professional sphere. Being an informed citizen, capable of critical thinking is "a real world situation." Although it's not a real world situation anyone cares about. Let Donald Trump serve as a wake up call.

We all learn about history throughout our education. That's not exactly what you'd call "applicable to a real world situation"... should we stop teaching our children history? And what about science? Unless you are going to pursue a career in science, studying biology is pretty impractical.

First of all, when is anyone's complete knowledge-set used for their job? Probably never.

Second, education is not just for getting a job. Liberal arts educations are valuable regardless.

I agree with this. When I lived in DC, only about 1 out of 5 professionals I knew had a career related to their college studies (-estimate-). Unless you are a scientist or engineer, what you get in college isn't "career training" but rather "learning to cooperate in a professional environment and engage in problem solving."

[Alan V]

First of all, when is anyone's complete knowledge-set used for their job?  Probably never.

Second, education is not just for getting a job.  Liberal arts educations are valuable regardless.

I agree with this. When I lived in DC, only about 1 out of 5 professionals I knew had a career related to their college studies (-estimate-). Unless you are a scientist or engineer, what you get in college isn't "career training" but rather "learning to cooperate in a professional environment and engage in problem solving."

My brother-in-law, a mechanical engineer, told me that his education was largely his way to prove he could learn to do the job he got. And he received his education at Carnegie Mellon.

[Belacqua]

There are countless benefits to knowledge outside the professional sphere.

It's horrifying to me that this isn't obvious to everyone. And the subtext of the article is offensive. It really seems to advocate that a worker should be educated up to the level necessary to do his or her job, and after that there is no reason to learn. 

Such a view is anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, and in my view, anti-what's good in life. 

It hasn't always been this way. 

In 18th and 19th century Britain (about which I've studied a little) university education was almost entirely for the sons of the wealthy, or training to be a parson. But people in the working and merchant classes were often very knowledgable, having spent their evenings reading and discussing actual good books. William Blake, for example, left formal schooling at 13 to apprentice to a printmaker. His father, who sold men's socks, approved. Yet Blake read on his own time and through his own motivation all the great philosophy that was available in English, and the classics of literature. 

The London intellectual circles in which he moved were full of such people. Thomas Taylor, for example, was an office clerk with no university education who taught himself Greek and became the most important translator of the century. Well-known intellectuals like Coleridge regularly spoke to sell-out crowds of "uneducated" people. The popular fiction of the day is today considered too hard for most people to read -- like Dickens. But Dickens had fans as passionate as Star Wars junkies, with far superior work. 

Walter Pater, an elite aesthete who influenced any number of non-elite people, wrote (paraphrasing): "education increases a person's capacity for pleasure." Today it seems that people believe the opposite. Education is only for money and pleasure has to be enjoyed with the mind switched off as much as possible. 

If you want to be cynical, this is another thing we can blame on the absolute triumph of capitalism, and its sole aim: exchange value. Far better to keep the workers stupid and focussed on idiocy like Game of Thrones.

[Alan V]

Walter Pater, an elite aesthete who influenced any number of non-elite people, wrote (paraphrasing): "education increases a person's capacity for pleasure." Today it seems that people believe the opposite. Education is only for money and pleasure has to be enjoyed with the mind switched off as much as possible. 

When I was in high school, I remember thinking that I didn't like my school because it was teaching the kids to dislike learning. It's a failure of the education system when teachers can't make education relevant to their students. A friend of mine and I carried on our own reading program on the side. Chris was the only national merit scholar in our class, and he dropped out of high school in disgust. He was much happier in college.

Of course, in the 1850s Thoreau complained about people not being interested in continual education, which he saw as one of the great joys and challenges of life. He got by as a pencil-maker and surveyor while he was reading Greek classics in the original Greek.

[Rhizomorph13]

I don't think the article is advocating to only learning enough for the job you have. The author is pointing out the situation where people failed to obtain a "good job" even though they did the "right thing" i.e. going to college. I work in a board development lab for Intel and I can tell you from experience how hard it is to find good people. We went through a period where we increased production many 100s of percents so we had to hire 150 people and I swear it was like someone shook a putz tree over our lab! To get even 10 good people we had to bring on so many temps and many of them had degrees in unrelated fields. Some even had proper electrical engineering degrees. Anyway, my point is that a degree, or knowledge acquisition in any way really, does not correlate with beneficial outcomes in the workforce UNLESS, you can use that knowledge within the company to effect positive change. For example I have learned a great deal about Excel through using that program at my job for the last 14 years so I bring some heat when operating that program. I do not have a degree and am one of the leaders on the floor due to my vast experience and ability to obtain and apply knowledge during day to day operations. In my time I have met far too many graduates who are entitled and that is the wrong attitude to have no matter what you know.