hottakes

kinda wild - theoretically i'm aligned, but can see this also quickly becoming a shitshow 😂 
https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/1910665112924439018

Hot take: Educational institutions should NOT pursue meritocracy and excellence.  They should pursue furthering humanity’s collective knowledge.

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard

your mom's favorite farcaster (probably), building /quidli 🦑 & /dist ♻️, casting in /justinahn, daoing in /🍊 & /🟪

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.

so then who gets to/should go to college?

A hotter take would to be include more of the certain concepts that are crucial for understanding yourself and building a flourishing society (and that are often only taught in college) in the basic educational stages. Mass tertiary education also has its issues.

This is the normal person take. Americans have such a skewed perspective on university. They believe it’s a mark on your resume and nothing else. This explains why so many of them buy their way to a degree while not demonstrating any merit nor excellence. 

The abolition of for profit universities would go a long way to solving this. Or, for the “free market” obsessives, the market’s decision not to value gamified credentials and instead choose knowledge accumulation by any and every other means (including low cost/non-profit institutions)