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links 🏴
@links
Hot take: Educational institutions should NOT pursue meritocracy and excellence. They should pursue furthering humanity’s collective knowledge.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so then who gets to/should go to college?
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links 🏴
@links
People who want to learn new things. The real answer is more nuanced - there was a distinction in the past that universities were for cutting edge research and colleges are for practical knowledge (ie go to college to get a job), but these distinctions have ceased to exist. Getting a job has outcompeted furthering knowledge. So every higher education institution’s main value is to help students get jobs. This has some terrible downstream effects, including making higher education essentially mandatory if you want to make money and pushing our youth into only specific kinds of jobs.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
so should anyone who "wants to learn new things" be admitted to a college without any kind of qualifications or credentialism? and then what should that cost and who foots the bill? personally do think that the institutionalization of higher education as a necessity for "white collar" jobs should be dismantled, for sure. but also do think that people should have the agency to understand, especially in this day and age, that you can simply just do things
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links 🏴
@links
Did I say that they should be admitted without any qualifications? Noooooo. That being said I do think things like MIT OpenCourseWare are a way to allow people to access education at low cost, and that’s a good thing. I get that meritocracy and excellence are values in education, but making them the point of college doesn’t serve society IMHO. As for who foots the bill - anyone who is sufficiently remarkable doesn’t pay for college, they get scholarships. This is how it’s worked since universities were invented.
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justin.ahn.eth
@ahn.eth
then what is the point of college? because historically it's been for people with the means to "dillydally" and or talented people patronized by those with the means to do so (individual or institutional). only in recent times has it become more banal and co-opted by banks to build more lending products. and where would scholarships come from? schools today offer them from endowments made possible by donors. in recent times, those donors are able to do so because they made/have money, which ideally the school has helped them do. personally totally for public education, education as a public good. but if higher ed is meant for the institutional pursuit of knowledge, then it probably should be gate kept pretty hardcore imo.
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