no one wants to go to college anymore
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- Опубліковано 23 вер 2024
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"Nobody does class solidarity like the rich" That line is Iconic
14:50 this line was so powerful, glad. the bourgeious plucks the flower from the pile of shit, but they didn't know the manure was fertilizer.
So true. How blind they are to issues that poorer people have to deal with is astonishing.
They believe they're in a just above average situation and have no idea they're actually in the top 1-10%
@@zax1998LU No they know about the issues of the poor and know they are doing well, they just don't care or profit from it and would rather the poor suffer so they can impress their wealthy friends.
Need this on a t shirt
Yes, it is iconic, but it is by no means Allice's.
I remember about a decade ago a lot of people used to say "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never finished university, so you don't really need to go to make something of yourself". The far less spoken part of that statement was that everyone Bill Gates and Steve Jobs employed DID go to university ... and there's only 1 Bill Gates and 1 Steve Jobs, but there are many, many, many very well paid Apple and Microsoft employees who couldn't have got their jobs without a relevant degree.
Also both of them had the financial means to just do whatever anyway
Same with warren buffet and his pr bs stunt of having a modest house and car😂
But the peasants eat that up
It's survivorship bias.
@@santostv. Er, what? Buffet living in the same house he’s had since he was just a millionaire (!) has nothing to do with education. He’s got a degree, and so did his partner Munger. The guy is nearly a hundred years old, and his sensibilities are from that post-robber-baron period when CEOs made just 20x their employees and people frowned on conspicuous consumption. The car thing is simple pragmatism, since he almost never drives - he’s had a 4-man security team for over 20 years after a kidnapping attempt.
Also both of them dropped out of Harvard (I’d say that’s pretty important)
I studied psychology, and it's so soul-crushing to see that the profession has developed more in the industrial side - HR, productivity, techniques to coup with stress and anxiety from corporate jobs but without bringing too much change - instead of the clinical side.
I am in Social Work in Canada. It is so sad to see it go more and more towards making us agents of control instead of focusing on changes to better help the population.
It is a bit demoralising
Neo liberalism is gonna do what neo liberalism is gonna do.
for me, the sad part is that in order to be considerated a good clinical psychologist you have to hit around the bush and almost lie to your patients because they cant handle a good ole confrontation with reality
Why waste your time on that when you could've just did trade
@@jeannedarveau7719what a waste of money lmao should've went to trade school
Naturally after this video ended I got a PragerU ad about how college is bad because it teaches anticapitalist propaganda.
If yr on android google 'reddit UA-cam revanced' lmao
god im so fucking proud to be an american 💀
Lol, for me it's trump campaign donation ads.
Given the other comments, one can (almost) suspect a concerted effort to have people not be critical thinkers. That is worrying on top of the message of this channel.
@@bertbaker7067 i live without ads since adblock was invented. My brain thanks me for the recent 18 years
13:40 “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
I miss Gould.
@@NicholasCotter Me too
Came here to post this. It's heartbreaking thinking of all the human potential being wasted by being victims of circumstance.
no place for geniuses in a world of equals
They seriously have that Incredible villain logic.
"And Once everyone is super!... No one will be."
My best friend was working in STEM and would often complain about how noble pursuits were never funded because they solved problems and didn’t help capitalism. Silicon Valley has a massive brain drain where intelligent people are chasing bigger paychecks from things like apps where you can have a dogface or helping coke predict the weather for their shipping routes. The stress from navigating this ultimately took my best friend’s life and I don’t want to see any more women go through this same situation. There needs to be more focus on funding solutions for everyone!
Capitalism will never fund the tools to emancipate people from capitalism. They were specifically told not to back in the 70's.
For as long as they can sell their bandaid solutions, capitalists will never invest in resolutions for the tough problems in our world.
Sincere condolences on your loss. The death toll of capitalism is atrocious… 😢
Wait your friend ended their life due to the stress and disenchantment with academia? That's wild. I'm so sorry that's awful.
"how noble pursuits were never funded because they solved problems and didn’t help capitalism."
Can you name one economic system that funds noble research over status-enhancing research?
When a university's purpose in society becomes simply preparation for a career, the corporate 'fat-trimming' will eventually reach academia and the liberal arts will be among the first casualties.
Appreciate you Alice, for sharing your love of learning with us. You make a positive difference in the world. ❤
"the liberal arts will be among the first casualties.": They already were victims. This isn't new, but the fact that life isn't affordable anymore makes academic experiences a lot worse.
Idk if "casualties" is the right word because the humanities aren't going away entirely, they're just gonna be for rich people only. Notice how us regular people can only lern 2 kode but rich kids get to study art, literature, music, film making, etc.
@@jeffersonclippership2588 excellent observation!
@@07Flash11MRC right. Who contributes valuable thought and art to the world when they are distracted by working 2 jobs to pay for food and a room and then paying back $50k in loans?
They do what I did and find a corporate drone job that pays just enough to scrape by.
@07Flash11MRC creators either exist in a world with other creators, or totally buck the system when opportunity presents itself (like punk rock).
Harvard has been described as a hedge fund with a university attached. This is the literal truth. As endowment-fund managers, their core business is accumulating and growing enormous sums of our clients' money: in Harvard's case, $50 billion and rising.
Don't forget accumulating real estate. A lot of major universities are infamous for buying up way too much infrastructure.
Harvard = a hedge fund masquerading as a university.
Do you know what a dividend is? Lol
How much does a state of the art microscope cost?
@@GraceCole-qy6ul The Harvard costs for a four-year degree, including books, tuition, and all other expenses is approximately $334,152. The average need-based scholarship or grant awarded to first-year students was $67,857 and 57% of first-year students qualify for need-based financial aid including federal and private loans and work-study.
Its not just the education side of it. Even if you graduate, there's no work. No one is interested in paying if there isn't a huge capitalist payoff. Like marketing. So many psych degrees go into marketing because there's no money in mental health, which we desperately need
This is THE observation that the entire conversation misses. Even the anti-school derision is really just fealty to today's hyperindividualized capitalism. Society needs the entire spectrum--the engineer designs the pipes, the manufacturer machines them, the driver delivers them, the store sells them, the plumber repairs them, ...
Shouldve went to trade school lmao
Well, you also need even more education to even really work in the mental health field and the vast majority of people run out of gas financially (_then_ you get the reward of probably the lowest-paying Masters' that could possibly get you a job)
Well, if you're talking about mental health things like drug rehab programs, the people who need the programs often don't have a job so they can't pay for them, and the people who are working and don't need the programs are resentful to have to pay for others who did not have the self-discipline to just say no. It's like the parable of the prodigal son.
@@epicotakugamer4930Based
The “people like me can’t do what they want in life” breaks my heart. Even the pursue to work according to one’s passion is conserved only for the privilege.
Yes, it is and it should be that. I don't want to subsidize a bunch of my citizens reading philosophy for 4 years. If they want to do it with daddy's money, then fine
Following your passion is overrated. Follow what you're good at that people will pay you to do. Save your passion for the bedroom and your hobbies
@@juniper-ug3hs People are passionate about healthcare, plumbing, welding, farming. If people only followed at what they're good at, we will never have a functioning society because we do not know exactly what we're good at unless you try many things until you land on something were you're passionate about.
@OmegaF77 being passionate about something and something being your passion are not always the same thing. I work in healthcare and I receive compliments for my bedside manner on a daily basis. I am passionate about doing my job well, and I have a talent for it. Medicine and my patients are not my passion. My spouse is a highly complimented educator, and their students are not their passion.
My passion is my family. When push comes to shove and the rate of compensation for our skills goes down, we will stop providing these services to society for something more lucrative. For hobbies, I have a passion for storytelling and myth. If I followed my passion to pursue writing, when I'm incompetent at it, would be horrible advice. Follow your skills and find a career where you like it 45% of the time, and you'll be happy. You can't eat dreams and I as a taxpayer don't want to fund some undergrad to study art for 4 years, no matter how much I enjoy a good sculpture.
@@juniper-ug3hsIf civilizations followed your advice we'd all still be living in the trees lol
I agree that not everyone can "follow their passion" or make all their dreams a reality, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt at least try to help others follow their passions. Thats the whole point of CIVILIZATION. of SOCIETY. To SUPPORT each OTHER in our endeavors. Maybe not all of them will succeed, but who knows, maybe one of them might eventually make an amazing contribution to society that could benefit you as well
Following your argument, should, say, Homer Hickam for example: A boy who had a passion for rocketry and eventually became a NASA engineer, should he have stopped "wasting his time" on his dream and just stuck to being a coal miner all his life like his father and everyone else in town?
Should the kings and patrons in the past stopped funding philosophers and artists like Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Da-Vinci, Michaelangelo, Ibn Sina, Lao Tzi, Confucius and such because their "dreams" didnt actively "contribute" to society or make money?
You want to paint the Sistine Chapel and create a beautiful artwork glorifying Christianity? Phsaww waste of time! Trying to understand the fundamentals of human interaction, morals and society? Why Confucius? Who needs morals and values, anyway!? :P
Calculus? Pythagorean theorems? That will never catch on! Theories about atoms? What even are atoms? You cant even see them? Useless! You want to make machines to reduce human labor? Whats a steam engine? Waste of money, stop being lazy, use your arms and work like everyone else! You have a dream to fly like a bird? Crazy, humans will never fly!
....And the list goes on...people cant eat dreams, true! But where would we be as a society if we didnt allow some of us to dream and follow their passions? It was because someone had a dream or passion that we have so much knowledge and technologies at our disposal today...
@@juniper-ug3hsthis is such a ridiculously laughable & stupid point. Where do you think sciences come from if not philosophy? Who organises and connects the ideas? And what about ethics, do ethics not concern you? Now many jobs you’ll get paid to do and might be good at are meaningless if not outright evil; like being a lawyer for some huge oil corporation.
And finally, please never say “leave some passion for the bedroom” to a woman or you’ll never see a woman in the bedroom
Meritocracy is a myyyyyyyth baybeeeee!
I spent two years cleaning and stocking kitchens at a risk management firm. One day, I got to overhear an employee making a lazy, misogynist joke about how stupid his wife was. For the punchline, he shrugged and said, “But, ya know, she went to public school.” It was only then that I realized the obvious: that nearly all of the four-hundred people I served had gone to private schools. Of course. Because their parents could afford to facilitate that.
Indeed. And not only is it a myth, it’s a myth that comes to us via people misunderstanding (deliberately?!?) a *satirical critique of the very concept* … sigh.
Did you look through the LinkedIn profiles of all 400 employees at your firm?
@@cth12345 what?
you really tried hard to shove in this comment every aspect of your virtue signaling :).
@@zarzavattzarzavatt9309And you tried really hard at virtue shaming.
"nobody does class solidarity like the rich" soooo true
It's pretty easy since there are so few of them
@@Praisethesunson It helps that they don't have to work and or think about survival
*A RECENT STUDY* shows that when you adjust for the wealth of the parents - going to university has NO advantage on your social mobility...!!!
YES people with good degrees from top universities earn higher money on average - but only the ones with wealthy parents. If YOU get a good degree from Harvard you wont get the high paying job - that will go to your wealthy classmates. Top universities is just ONE way of gatekeeping the wealth, you pass through that, they still have other ways of denying you...!!!
@@jeffersonclippership2588 they do have to think about survival, just in a different scale: their struggle is to retain control over others, rather than to earn their next meal
4:00 One thought that comes to mind after seeing this person's comment on her struggles with 2 degrees is how much years you spend outside the workforce, without generating income. After you finish your studies, you roll the dice to see if your expertise is marketable, and if your years of lost income will be compensated by a higher income later on. This doesn't depend on how important your field of study is, but on market factors and myopic decision-makers. The reliance on corporate money and grants for academic research is also a side of academia that frankly shocked me, especially considering how said corporate money gets a huge return on investment. Capitalism has made academia anemic and dependant on the whims of a few people with a business management degree, deciding which pursuits are worthy by the dollar amount it generates.
Social sciences are particularly damaged by this, since they were already stigmatized. Their very influence on contemporary thought and culture is unrecognized at best.
To be fair, many people carry on in academia because the job market is scary. If that's your motivation, you will make bad decisions. It took me many years to enter the job market because I was getting qualifications, but I always had a very clear idea that I wanted to work in academia and do research, and it paid off. But when I see people who are unsure, I tell them not to take that second postdoc, and always do some teaching on the side, so they always have something beyond just papers to prove they've been working.
I think part of it is the fact that society has placed arbitrary values on certain tasks that do not take into account how important they are. For example, in the US, an ambulance driver is a critically important job, but it is not valued, and therefore makes one of the lowest salaries in the country (even lower than food service in some places). If you try to argue that these people should be paid more, you are instantly met with a barrage of comments about how that job doesn't deserve more because of the skill set, the field of employment it's in, it will raise costs for medical patients, etc. The onus is largely on the individual to seek out employment that pays more instaed of acknowledging that some jobs just simply should be paid more due to their level of importance to the fabric and function of society. Much of this is decided by corporations, yes, but we as people largely defend this system of payment and use many excuses to justify it. Anyone who tries to unionize or argue against the system is automatically labeled a threat to society, a scourge on the economy, etc. Meanwhile, I don't think anyone has given serious thought to what would happen if all or most of the abulance drivers quit and pursued jobs that paid better.
Social science is only valued when it's short form videos talking about pop psychology and "quirky history facts".
@@fairywingsonroses Another even better example of a critical job is garbage or waste disposal. Any critical job should be valued. Unionization is important to address the current issues with the job market, but a more comprehensive change is required. Collective ownership in the form of cooperative companies at least should address the devaluation of labour based on their perceived value and (perceived) required skillset.
But regarding social sciences in general, the necessity of marketability for academic research will keep resulting in bad outcomes. The decision-makers don't have any incentive to think long-term, or measure the impact of said research. There are many factors that cause this, from the political system to the economic system.
Personally, changing the economic system and allowing for the state to invest more heavily in research in general that takes a long time to bear fruit would be ideal. The destructive "symbiosis" between corporations and academia should end. It's more subservient than anything else. Especially in terms of publishing.
@@fairywingsonroses next time I get into a "minimum wage needs an update" row with my dad, I think I'll apply the "It's meant for teenagers working for pocket change!" argument to ambulance drivers and see how well that flies. I for one would LOVE to open that field to sleep-deprived fifteen-year-olds who don't need to be able to support themselves. /s
It's funny how these people saying "don't go to university", have already been born into the socioeconomic bracket that would allow them to move into the circles they aim to belong to. A white german woman can very easily say " don't go to university" when they already have a passport that opens all countries to her, just by an accident of birth. A woman from Guatemala could only aspire to the jobs Sabine looks down on with a PhD and speaking 4 languages, and still faces a huge amount of racism in the liberal and free West.
In all fairness, I think she does not say not to go to university. She says that the academic career path _after_ graduation is a grind - which it is. The fact that there are worse grinds (like, that stated woman from Guatemala will likely live in) does not invalidate that point. That's a bit of a whataboutism - you will very likely always find a situation that is significantly worse. I am sure if I wanted to, I could top said woman from Guatemala with say a child working in a North Korean labour camp. But that will help neither, so I wont.
you did not get the point. She was showing the struggles within a field and how capitalism has made a trap about it. She shows phenomena and trends (like a decline in people attending to college) and how only privileged people can complete that. Im a privileged person, and I'm doing a PhD and a lot of my friends who are also studying to work in academia, we're all depressed about it. It is a problem, and if you want to do something you are entitled to feel bad if the environment around it is shit.
Your example from the woman from Guatemala is BS, that does not contradicts the points being made, is just another sad reality. Your examples sound like "hey dont complain because you wanted to do science and discover stuff, but instead if you do not get grants your degree will give you nothing, at least you have privileges" so...that is supposed to make us happy? are we not valid as humans with dreams? just because other people are in worse conditions than us?
Sometimes I wonder what am I going to do after my phd, will I get a job that I like? will I be happy with the activity that occupates 1/3 of my day? if you think I'm not allowed to worry about this...ooff. So this video is about a certain reality, and it's accurate if you don't like it, then the video is not for you.
Si hablas español esto sería más fácil (lo digo por tu nombre).
Although I agree the people often spewing capitalism bad and don’t go to college crowd are the same ones that benefited from the “system”, from my understanding only a few jobs do really need academia to get a job, the majority doesn’t require and you don’t even earn more for having it.
But it’s true they are ladder pusher’s like the rich they supposedly hate 😂
@@hyleg666 I honestly believe both points are valid
Everyone has a right to happiness, and ofc academia is depressing and university degrees, masters,, studies, PhDs, they don't necessarily mean financial security
We know academia doesn't guarantee a secure and happy future and that the system is messed up.
I believe the entire academic system needs to be changed
But that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a privilege to be able to receive quality high education (even though it should be just a basic human right) and that lots of people around the world don't have it, and it's unfair
Plus when looking for good jobs, having studies is definitely not the same as not having them.
The German woman has much more facilities in the sense that she can decide not to study but the Guatemalan woman will study even if she doesn't want to because it's her only chance of getting a good job
That's what I think anyway
@@yasminechoerryscherry3701 yeah but the video mentions how hard it is to study for the unprivileged, and if You study something that gives no money, as social sciences or art or if You want to make research, the sacrifice is almost not worth it. Thats the point of this video, not saying "hey don't study if You don't have privileges" thats why I think the comment I replied to is out of place. A low class person will get benefits IF they study something profitable, 'cause everything is about money, not what You like or dream.
There's a certain irony in Sabine making a video complaining about academia and how it's being ruined by the pursuit of profit, when not so long ago she posted a video defending capitalism as an economic system and the profit incentive.
Capitalism is one thing and pursuit of knowledge another. She herself said she was naive not knowing how academia worked.
"not so long ago she posted a video defending capitalism": Yes, but that video pretty much exposed her lack of knowledge about cap[...]ism as an economic system. She thinks the sheer existence of markets is automatically a sign of the system being capitalistic, even though markets predate cap[...]ism. So really, in a way shes not even defending it, lol.
Sabine also had an extremely incorrect video about transgender people and I stopped following her
You don't seem to understand the meaning of words very well if you can draw that nonsense conclusion from that initial premise. Presumably you didn't get far in your educational journey. So sad.
@07Flash11MRC true; it was a very surface view of capitalism and it’s like saying “Sweden is socialist” or any economy with taxes that support people is socialist, while they are not.
I went to school to be a teacher. I never expected to be rich, but I did expect to be able to afford to move out of my parents' house (something I quickly discovered I could not do). I loved teaching, but our government does not see the value in funding education, so teachers don't get paid well at all. It doesn't help that conservatives hate public education and would be glad to see it fall. I don't think they've really thought about how much more expensive it would be to clean up all of the damage, crime, homelessness, etc. that would occur if public schools ceased to exist and kids had nowhere to go, or if quality teachers all quit to find better-paying jobs. It's an infuriating irony that their unwillingness to fund education and pay teachers better is costing us much more in homelessness, substance abuse, prison costs, etc. I don't regret going to school, but I do feel like I was cheated out of having a quality life by the narrative that going to school is your ticket to success. If that were true, I wouldn't have been living with my mom until age 39. I personally do not encorage my high school students to go to school. One of my 11th graders completely dropped out this year, and I gave her a hug and let her go because sometimes blazing your own path works just as well or better than fighting with the system that has repeatedly failed to live up to what it promises people.
I'm in education, also. Found out I was too neurodivergent to be particularly effective in a K-12 classroom, and am privileged enough that I was able to pursue a PhD so I can support and prepare more teachers, instead.
And it is so dismal. The experience of teaching was dismal, the stories my classmates who are still teaching have to tell are dismal, the news is dismal, the funding available to the School of Education is dismal (since we were also downgraded from our own College to merely a School within the university)...
The undergrads come in so excited, and by the end of their first semester observing in classrooms, they've gone grim. Our attrition rate is abysmal, and that's before these people actually become teachers. My state is in such dire straits that they're handing out provisional certifications right and left to people with no training in pedagogy, and they don't stay, either.
I am aghast and agog at the state of public education in my area, and can't understand how our population has been convinced that *decreasing* resources is going to make it better.
@@quiestinliteris I'm neurodivergent too, and I was lucky enough to find a school where I could work around that, but I still got burned out, and the salary did not pay the bills, so I quit. I now work with grad students, but food service honestly pays more. It's frustrating that they charge tens of thousands in tuition to be in these graduate programs, and the tutors get paid food service wages. My husband is a professor at the same college, and his starting salary was less than mine was as a K-12 teacher. It's ridiculous. I feel like two college-educated people should be doing better, but jobs in acadamia just don't pay. I'm thinking of getting my master's but I don't want to go into education. I loved teaching, but I will never be able to reach my financial goals if I stay in this career field.
You guys from the USA?
@@santostv. n o s h i t
Conservatives are definitely part of the problem, but aren't the only ones to blame. A lot of schools have become zoos from lack of discipline. Some of that is from liberals trying to keep the bad kids mixed in with the good kids to try to keep things more equal. But instead of helping the bad kids learn more, it instead makes the good kids learn A LOT less. That was enough to get me to give up on the idea of teaching VERY quickly after I tried it. It's a sad state of affairs.
When i started engineering school at a small STEM school it was a huge culture shock from growing up in a rural middle class town, because almost all of my peers come from white upper class families. Im funding my education with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt in the hopes that I can get a good enough job to pay it off once I get my degree, but im worried that it will be difficult for me to find a job in my field that doesn't contradict my personal morals and ethics. A large percentage of the materials engineering job market is defense contractors, and oil companies here in America. I wish grad school was an option for me but i simply cant afford it unless I can find a company to finance my education while i work.
I have a similar experience to that in the UK from a mechanical engineering side. Especially in Engineering aswell I find the lack of equipment is so significant. Most people on the degree had 3D printers and all kinds of equipment at home for designing. And for me to have nothing it definitely made it so much harder to achieve.
And then when you finish University, all jobs are in defence or oil processing. It is really hard to find something that lets you stick to your ethics, and even if you do you are looking at a much smaller salary. On top of that if you have no connections with those engineering companies already then it is even more of a struggle. I would have loved to stay at university to do a PhD but I would have less than minimum wage. So you are very much just forced down a path with no option to make your own choices. I wish you the best of luck with everything because I know how difficult it can be.
@@crusadertank970yea i relate to that a lot. Hopefully the school name on my future degree will give me some good opportunities like my profs keep telling me.
If you’re already in thousands of dollars in debt then why not take more loans for graduate school? Genuine question.
No one pays for STEM PhDs. All STEM PhDs are funded and provide stipends to their students.
@@The112Windows
I can guarantee you that's not the case
The legal limit is 300€ per month which is frankly nothing
You can get it funded by a company but most of the money goes to your lab and you generally get the minimum salary 1200€ per month
The Agro Paris Tech students remind me a lot of my friend's forestry schooling. All of the best graduates end up working for either a large logging company where they are actively destroying the forest, sustainably to these companies is being able to re-harvest trees in another 40 years, not protecting the ecosystem. Or they end up working for the government, which said friend is currently doing, his job will be to send reports and recommendations on logging practices and limits, these recommendations will be mostly ignored.
His schooling focused a lot on environmental protection, best possible practices, however, even his professors felt the need to express just how bleak the situation actually is. They seemed to agree that the forests are more or less doomed within the next 100 years or so due to a multitude of factors, and working in the forestry felid means knowing that but contributing to it anyway. The result is a class of people who went in with a love for forests and nature now coming out of the program with a learned indifference. My friend is a rather stoic person by nature and he's happy to being working the government job rather than a corporate one but it really is just the lesser of two evils.
Some of my friends are also graduating from forestry, and the same scenario is happening to them as well. I'm currently studying in a connected field of science: biology and ecology. Since the forestry industry in Canada is lucrative, the most talented students win scholarships and prizes. As for me, who studies in a field that isn't beneficial to the economy (since we mostly put a stop to forestry companies and construction projects), no scholarships and prizes are given to encourage students to pursue higher education. I find it lamentable that talented colleagues of mine don't want to get a master's degree anymore since inflation hits too hard and that support (such as scholarships) is too hard to get.
I experienced the same for geology/environmental engineering, although I think that government job is in the service of private companies, since there are no laws to effectively prohibit certain activities (pollutions/destrucions). Laws are written by politicians who are coupled to private companies. (I worked at a Hungarian governmental organization for 6 years.)
problems like this are why we need to build better systems of communal education. UA-cam lectures and essays are great, but this is also research projects, book clubs, academic forums, public libraries, film screenings, creating art...
When you talk about 'communal education' and then name 'book clubs' and 'film screenings', it reminds me of the communist system in the Soviet Union. The commune will dictate what gets shown, what gets told, what you need to believe. This is also an issue - because your comment focusses on social and cultural education. However, during Communism, you are very much limited in expression of culture. There is a reason why so few books survived (mostly because they had to be burned to fuel houses), but also if your story was in any way critical of the Party or the Commune, you disappeared.
Education is more than social and cultural critique - you won't solve a health crisis by painting paintings. Russia was very much willing to let the Ukrainians starve after the Russians stole the potatoes from the land.
@@BruceKarrde We can learn from the mistakes of the USSR and other socialist projects to create a much more equitable society without capital being its God.
@@BruceKarrde um. what. how much practice do you need in mental gymnastics before you can turn any conversation into one about the soviets?
@jananias2985 because we know how "communal education" turns into "if you don't share our beliefs, you're not allowed to lecture". Just look at the "communal education" going on in current universities - if you're not a commie, you get no place to hold talks. Just look at the channel "SWP" social workers party. There's no way a right wing party could pull off what they're doing.
@@jananias2985 God forbid a man to point out the flaws of a system when the system has the words "communal", "books", "art" and overall, my personal favorite: "poor".
im a Spanish student had a seminar from some teachers and researchers from my uni and they talked about developing new ways to provide drugs that target specific cells and about transforming PET plastic into vainilline to then make a polymer (that was a student protect by the way) and what surprised me the most is the amount of free work they do, like the student were not getting paid and the researchers work a lot for what they get payed.
Also most people I know are in a similar situation to what u described, I live in Madrid and the rent is in many cases higher that the average income so many students live with their parent and take public transport for about an hour to two hours, and some days they have to stay form 8 am to 8 pm at uni for different classes and seminars so they really get no sleep. It's also very sad that all the work is disrespected by so many econ influencers
and all of the hard work for it to be made into a product that corporations will get rich off and they'll get nothing but a pat in back
Probably their work is not valuable enough for other people. Otherwise they would get good salaries. You cannot measure value of a product by effort put into the work, but by how it is useful for others. If you did not do so, digging and burying a hole in the ground for one day would have the same value as mining sand for the same amount of time.
@@marekvarmuza4916It is valuable for the society, not for the places of power tho.
The system would rather make u suffer from the illness for 10-20 yrs and get the most amount of money out of you and ur family than to actually finance a group of people who'd be able to make a drug for you and others with the same illness letting u lead a normal life.
The idea that college is merely a job training institute says a lot about our society.
The "choosing a pragmatic thing to study" is not really a countryside phenomenon, it's a working class phenomenon. Getting a job and earning money is just very important to working class people. For me it was basically: "law or medicine"...
Almost all people need a job that makes money, even most people in the upper class. The "idle rich" is a small fraction of the upper class. Those are the people for whom money doesn't matter. Everyone else is on a budget.
@@blah163 for sure, but that's not what I'm saying. For one, it's subjective: poorer people want more security when it comes to jobs, so they choose the field of study that most clearly and most certainly leads to a stable career from their perspective. It's also a question of access to networks: wealtier people have the social and cultural capital to make money in a less clearly job-oriented field, say journalism, art, languages, history... They also have the confindence and the financial leeway to look for a job for a while.
I mean i'm planning on going into law, but taking a high minded political lens in it and probably ending up as a well educated bum
@@WibblyWobbly1905 if you do well in law, I'm sure there's always a decent and moral job for you out there. You're probably not going to end up extremely rich unless you're prepared to be immoral, but there are always jobs. I went into social services, for instance, and trade unions need lawyers too.
@@blah163 Even Johnny Depp is on a budget, because that 2 million a month he spends is crushing him.
Your point about meritocracy reminds me of something that happened when I was in uni during covid. My school allowed students to take the letter 'P' (pass) on their transcript rather than a letter grade due to the disruptions caused by covid. This was the semester where many students had to leave. Many students were forced to stay isolated on campus. Many even lost their jobs which had kept them afloat. It was a challenging time for everyone. There was a group of students, I'm recalling on in particular who was vocally upset about the university allowing students to take a 'P' grade. They argued that they worked so hard for their grade without concern for what others may have gone through, those who couldn't go home, or had a home to go to, those who lost their jobs and were facing food insecurity etc. It felt sad that people just wanted to win in their race, be it unfairly.
Crabs in a bucket
Yesterday, an instagram reel came across my page by this wealth "influencer" where he talked of this scenario where a teacher said that, if the class average was above 75% on an exam, then the entire class would pass and he asked the audience to guess which students were the happiest about this. He goes on to say that it was the students who were lazy, messed around and didn't do any work were the ones happiest about this and ended of the scenario by saying, "This isn't about exams" obviously implying that socialists and the like are lazy and don't want to do anything but suck up government benefits. And, I remember sitting there laughing to myself because of just how non nuanced of a take it was.
Omg is this UP haha I remember this
@@brownsugarissupreme no actually 🙂 But it’s interesting that this happened also in UP
Amazing video as always! I would like to add how awful is the academic publishing industry is. Academics are exploited by big publishing companies that resells their free work at such high prices. It's nerve wrecking
Holy shit, those engineering grads unloaded both barrels in that ceremony.
it is nice to see though. 😆
I’m a PhD student in STEM. The research we are allowed to pursue as graduate students has to be profitable to someone, usually oil, pharma, or the military. It’s sad. It feels like we are part of the capitalism machine, which is precisely what many of us were trying to avoid by going into academia.
Physics PhD here. It was extremely depressing, and there was nobody to talk to about it. I lost my faith in the whole enterprise by the end.
this is one of the main reasons i ultimately decided not to pursue STEM. i realized that any work/research i did would have to have a profit incentive. that felt so hollow to me
What is an area of research you would have pursued otherwise?
@@maximusthegreatestseconded. If you had the freedom to pursue ANY question with total guarantee that you would receive all the funding, equipment, and assistance you need, what would it be?
@@quiestinliteris for my part, and this is 30 years ago now, it was photonics. Now I would have chosen something quite different. But my children, there’s the question. They won’t have the privileges that I did. I was in the last generation in the UK that got paid to learn.
I love the way French folks say "bullshit". Makes it sound so classy. 🙂I'll be honest--despite its imperfections, barely being able to pay bills as a teacher of watered down Social Studies to Middle Schoolers, I miss academia. 😞 Here in the US, I'm seeing the prohibitive costs of university mixed with a cultural disdain for the intellectual class really creating a hostility to education as a whole. And tbh this was the whole point of withdrawing government funding for public universities and pushing what Isaac Asimov called "the cult of ignorance"--the conservatives want a good education to be the property of the wealthy. Sad to see. Great video as always, Alice!
Timestamp?
@@ouss For when she says bullshit? IDK, just watch it.
"Classy" not very lefty of you appropriating the status quo
Americans have always hated smart people, this is nothing new.
Working classy or bourgeois classy?
I tried sharing this video with a left leaning academic friend of mine who has his PhD and teaches, but his only response was "too much swearing." That's it. It doesn't matter how intelligent Alice is or how interesting her arguments are, the moment a swear word was used she was seen as some vulgar peasant not to be taken seriously. It seems like Alice was correct that academics are becoming more and more concerned with classism and using the "correct" language rather than actual ideas and progress.
If only she was a 6’4 man lmfao
I feel like i've seen this before. Ah yes tribalism. The so called progressive burgousie get offended at a swear word and disregard the whole message. Even worse they see that person as less.
Swearing is seen as primal and lower class but being the elite hoarding the wealth and destroying the planet is considered ok.
Lmfao, that's why working class people are always the most fun to be around. The stick you friend has londged in their arse has to be bigger than them.
Not everyone wants to hear disrespectful language in others. You might accept to lower your standards but, not everyone is willing to let go of manners.
Has anyone else noticed how fatalistic anyone who defends this system is? You’ll even see it in the comment threads here. It’s the last gasp of respectability: they might even agree with you that the system is bad, but shrug and say that any attempt to improve things is either stupid or counterproductive. It is the most naked cynicism, the kind of pungent sociopathy we associate with villains in dystopias
I have a whole dissertation on career fairs and how there’s a profit based thinking in discussions around academia.
Studying the humanities has never been more important! The complexity and unknown unknowns of our modern world require people to be versed in philosophy, history, etc., we face problems that cannot simply be managed by computer programming and statistical calculations.
Sorry I stuck at history and English too much and a science math girly😭
it could be that we start seeing a demand for art degrees with the rise of AI, chat gpt 4 just came out and it seems it could do most menial work that investment bankers, analysts, software engineers could do
@@adriangutierrez3196 If competence were the only factor, that might be true. But half those fields are just window dressing for moneyed interests anyway.
Very well said! being a STEM student, my world was shook when I started reading sociology, developmental economics n psychology. There can be no equality or equity derived from technology if its developed in a society that's so unaware of humanities
Most subjects are important but that doesn't mean they are financially valuable. Go ahead and study the humanities and enjoy the benefits, but understand that those benefits do not (usually) include a large salary.
Loved this video- even though I immediately felt depressed afterwards. The class war is real. 😢
It's the only war.
Middle class won’t exist soon. Just rich and poor.
I have a similar story to Mohammed, worked a lot in college, son of a teacher and an artist so we never had money, but still better off than many. Barely made it out with my chemistry degree - when I started I thought I would pursue phd or something, but the cost was too great so I got out and got to work to pay bills.
People usually get paid to do a phd. Which country are you talking about?
I find it interesting that Sabine criticises her experience with the physics industry and its concern with making money over science after being a pretty stubborn defender of capitalism in her recent video about it lol
So many people treat capitalism like a religion. They start with the conclusion that capitalism is right and good, work backwards from there, and have to spin up some nonsense to avoid the obvious conclusion that it's the problem.
Corruption is a human issue not a capitalist one.
@@LNVACVAC Nah. Capitalism needs to be abolished.
It's the liberal mindset. Capitalism is the greatest thing of all time, it's just bad people who do bad things. Ask them about any other system and people are never at fault, only the system itself
@@LNVACVAC how can you conclude that? How many societies and eras have you studied?
It's been heartbreaking watching one of my favourite science UA-camrs slowly turn into a grifter (Sabine). As with other grifters, they do so well by taking a truly bad situation we all face and then running off wild with it, completely failing to address the root cause.
Same. I found her channel very early - I think she had fewer than 5k subs at the time? And I was a staunch supporter. And then she started both-sidesing subjects that genuinely do not have two evidence-backed sides, and...
Yeah, heartbreaking, exactly as you said. I should know better by now than to become emotionally invested in strangers on the Internet, but man, she got me.
I have very similar experience to you both. I was just so disappointed.
Grifting means broader audience.
@@quiestinliteris why did you state that you think she had fewer than 5k subs with a question mark at the end?
Universities are primarily research institutions where education sometimes happens. The primary goal of a research institution is to secure funding for research and education comes second. This results in having less contact time with your professor, which means you have to find other resources to supplement your learning. Thats why even in college so many people dont go to class. Also there is no reason a liberal arts degree should be the same length of time as an STEM degree. My dad did his engineering degree in india and it was 5.5 years and more rigorous than what the US does. Most office jobs can be done with just some on the job training. By requiring college for a good future we're taking away opportunity for people who are not academically inclined but otherwise capable.The way to fix universities is to separate the academic research from teaching.
You covered a lot of the issues that I experienced in my path to a (more or less pointless) PhD. One aspect of academia that I wasn't prepared for was how ridiculously high the expectations are for grad students - get published, present at and help organize conferences, do TA work, teach courses, stay up to date on scholarship in your field, learn new languages, travel for research, navigate the bizarre bureaucratic and interpersonal minefield of academia... oh, and also do your coursework, exams, and write a dissertation. Oh, and somehow survive in a city like Toronto on $15,000/year (unless you get a big grant).
All of that creates a system that massively privileges people from wealthy backgrounds and people with quite unbalanced personalities, which is how you wind up with such a generally... difficult group of people, often with very little perspective, who become profs, and therefore control the experience of grad students. It's a shit show.
One of the best episodes of this year, Alice!!! Keep talking about academia, please
Uni was useless for me. I always say that I learned 2 things- my SSN ands my Dr. License number because back when I attended, these 2 numbers were required for everything.
lol same
Yes and no for me, I went to college but it was what I used college for that gave me everything I ever wanted. Not tge degree itself.
This is talked about in every field: how the profit motive corrupts the intention of the field. Education, media, science, government, etc. We should give it a unified name to build awareness and power behind it. How about Capitalist Corruption? Or Capitalist Corrosion?
The problem is that college is oversaturated, which brings the value of degrees down. We also don't want to push all people 100% completely to the trades because it will create the same problems in the opposite direction. The solution is to have a healthy balance of both. That means not everyone will go to college, and that's okay. They can go into the trades.
Automation is another factor
@@Leopard69and that's already been in effect for a few businesses.
Right now where I live there is an issue actually of the lack of trade instructors, so even if people want to get into the trades, they basically are shit out of luck if they don't know anyone willing to take them on and train them
Show me the working in your claim.
I'm an electrician, I used to do mostly residential work, and wealthy people were always the worst to deal with, and the old socialist proverb, "they need us more than we need them," is absolutely true. How some people could be so smug and at the same time need to call an electrician to reset a GFI outlet is unbelievable. Occasionally, there'd be an exception, but not often. I did a lot of work at the house of a former CIA director and his wife was very nice, although they weren't as rich as some of our other customers.
Because they are only good at that specific area of study and have money to outsource almost everything meanwhile most poor people have they primary focus but because of economy reasons need to know a bit of everything or have a good support network.
@@santostv. Yes and no, at least in my experience. We had a lot of rich clients. I knew around 20 well and met dozens more. The majority weren't any more intelligent or more capable than people in general, they just got paid way more. The real difference was coming from rich, well connected families. It's cliche, but it often _isn't what you know, but who you know instead._
A few guys actually were really smart and extremely proficient at what they did, however, those guys were also not as rich as most of the others.
Kinda sucks, but... nepotism > meritocracy
I studied math in college and loved most of it. Stopped at the Bachelor level. Grad school in that subject was both too difficult and expensive. Initially I was resentful that my choice of major didn't yield immediate financial rewards, but about a decade later I seemed to be doing okay financially with an accounting job, and even my limited math abilities provided me with a hobby that could potentially last me a lifetime. I still do mathematics as a hobby in my 40's and I know SO much more now than when I initially graduated in my 20's. And it's a lot of fun when you can pursue your mathematical interests on your own rather than having to guide your path to what's being tested.
So I'm glad college gave me a tool bag that could keep me climbing an intellectual ladder LONG after graduation, even if I'm kind of plateaued on the corporate and economic one. Sure adds a lot of spice to life. But saving money with community college BEFORE university was a WISE move. I love community colleges. And I actually DID end up going to grad school in accounting, but I took it slow so I wasn't paying so much money for tuition at once.
it’s so conforting to know of your existence in this world, alice, it makes everything feel less like screaming into the void. thank you
It is sad how people from poorer backgrounds want to go study at university but cant due to financial difficulties. But at the same time middle class people are being told to go to university even if they dont want to, in order to be better than their peers and get better jobs in this capitalist society.
@15:00... Droppin' facts! I grew up in a kinda poor part of southern California, am an army/ war vet, and went to grad school... at Yale. It was a strange place to be most of the time. :/
Yale is pretty strange, and a bit alienating, for a lot of us townies, too. At least the apizza is good.
Johns Hopkins presented similar problems for me. I'd never felt so blue-collar.
I really needed to hear that… I’m in the finishing stages of my bachelor’s degree and don’t really feel like doing this anymore. I promised myself that I want to write my degree about something that has meaning to me. There are to many discourses which are only a thing because they look good to third-party funds. So I chose to write about decolonization, which means I will be a taxi driver soon.
Hey now that isn't all true.
You are going to be an Uber driver. The taxis got killed by app based labor exploitation
💀💀@@Praisethesunson
All worthwhile pursuits are corrupted by profit incentives. So much education is needed for educations sake but we don’t value education enough. We barely value anything at all besides profits and money. I work in healthcare mostly because I want to use my skills to help people but they’re so many constraints to that. Especially when helping people becomes more about learning how to navigate the insurance companies and fight with higher ups to reduce patient bills or get the required care approved by insurance. So many hoops to jump through just to make it harder to actually get any benefit from your insurance if you even have it which is another horror story.
College being affordable would certainly help
Colleges have a total monopoly on higher education. If you don't want to spend four years listening to lecturers, taking classes unrelated to the subject matter, have having very limited hands on experience before graduation, you have no real alternative options for higher education, at least none that employers will even consider.
@@bluebonic3497such a sad truth but ya right❤
In Germany it is, and we're still capitalist.
@bluebonic3497 screw the employers and screw the colleges!!!!
Or imagine getting your necesities covered while you pursue your career. I understand that has to be paid by tax dollars but that's a investition made in the youth that will pay of.
Two months ago we had massive student protests and occupations in Greece when the lib-right government tried to pass a law legalizing the founding of private universities. I think many people in the West would be surprised by this, but actually the Greek constitution explicitly prohibits private entities from founding universities or higher level education institutes with equivalent degrees. What's even more remarkable is that the constitution is very careful with explicitly prohibiting, and this article is one of a very select few where it is so explicit.
Still, the gov capitalized on the bad state our universities are in after a decade of austerity and limited funding and will bypass it. However this led the public to debate on the nature of universities. Many in academia pointed out the profit-driven model of other countries and how that shifts the goals of academia. They also pointed out how tuition crept in in countries that allowed this (all public universities in Greece are free). Still, Greece was labeled by the gov as the black sheep of all other EU and "developed" countries, stuck in the past and not being "open" enough. The law passed. The worst thing is a great number of students and people in academia were in favor, not recognizing the value of publicly funded universities.
As an American who did grad school (M.S. and PhD) in two European countries, I really wish I could go back and take a different path. When I started my master's, I quickly realized how behind I was. I was surrounded by people who didn't have to work 25-35 hours per week to afford a bachelor's because their countries were not completely backwards yet (they are all following America lol). After doing my master's, I went to the US and tried to find work, but never found anything in my field. When I got a Marie Curie PhD scholarship in a poorer European country, one that nobody wanted to move to, I went full in. Unfortunately, all the efforts were for nothing as I got 1 interview in my field over two years and zero job offers. I now work at a city gov doing simple things that barely require a degree.
The thing that bothered me most about academia was the clear divide between rich and poor students. It was already annoying in America seeing around 25% of the students in my bachelor's appearing to be financially set regardless of how their studies went. It was worse each degree up I went. Fewer and fewer students without wealthy parents existed. I met great people from around the world, but almost none of my classmates and research partners were from poor backgrounds. They were able to calmly do their work without any anxieties, which made it really isolating. I had only one person around me who I could relate to during my PhD.
I am now a decade behind on student loan debt repayment and have watched ALL affordable housing disappear in cities during my near decade in grad school. Had I just kept at a boring life with a bachelor's degree, I'd probably be much better off. It makes me really mad to hold a scientific PhD and see zero career opportunities to use it, unless I want to fight for a poverty salary at a temporary postdoc!
You have a wonderful perspective on so many topics. It's refreshing to hear about such an important issue from different points of view. Good work.
I switched from an engineering degree to a fashion buying degree and both left me discontent because neither tackled the root problem and when I would bring up capitalism my grades would suffer. My dissertation was literally titled "the socio-economic inequalities in sustainable fashion" and it just wasn't good for them
A lot of success in the world is giving your customer what she wants. You didn't give your professor what she wanted, so you didn't get what you wanted. Sure, it shouldn't be that way, but that's the way the world works. It's no different with parents, friends, and bosses.
thank you for talking about upward mobility among the classes. I also come from a working-class, countryside background and now that I moved upward, I have more spare money and I am pursuing a master's degree at 26. This year, I got fed up with people originally coming from higher classes, I feel like I never belonged, what is more, that the exploitation didn't end with me moving up but continued. It is very frustrating because it's hard to vocalise these feelings and takes a long time until you become aware of what is happening. I am glad more people recognise these motions and express their emotions around them.
I know this is off-topic, but I really enjoyed the recent Deprogram podcast episode featuring Alice!
I just reapplied to go back to school, don’t sleep on college it is worth it. Making money is only a distraction to finding the secrets of the universe.
An unemployed Ph.D. degree holder here (and yes, for all those neoliberals obsessed with the assumptions of unemployed laziness out there, I am NOT applying for academic work, only). The funny paradox is that while academics are, in my experience, mostly lovely people and have solidarity towards their colleagues, the academia is a toxic place. Structures, especially financial and political ones, breed that toxicity.
i love youtubers who put the ad at the end. ty for the knowledge
there are still people who see ads?
10:21 Absolutely not surprised by him being a typical Indian uncle who has a problem with ‘non-productive’ degrees.
Achha tereko bada pata hai hein.
@@ChootVol1 Tu rehne de
Hi Alice, not related to this particular video but I wanted to give you huge kudos for making such thought provoking and accessible videos. I got very into video essays over the pandemic but have lately found that most of them are very repetitive- everyone will make a video on 'sephora kids' then next week everyone will do 'trad wives' etc etc. However, I'm also not generally into philosophy videos- I find them to be a bit too abstract for my youtube downtime. I think you do a really good job of finding novel topics with an application to real life, and then simplifying it enough that it's understandable while still providing a lot to think over.
1:55 Wow that’s quite an academic arc and honestly, WERK 🔥
I’m from Brazil, here we have private and public University, but the problem with the public institutions is that they have to select a certain amount of people who can enter by using a national exam that is so difficult that for the majority of people can't pass.
Use Sabine's video in the start is both ironic and revealing, in the sense that she is still naive about the academic system even after she quits for her frustration by her experience in her field, which is precisely due to her non-questioning presumption about the social structure formed by capitalism. It partially reveals how one can be intellectually engaging in one subject yet have the confidence to talk about another, just like her video on capitalism shows the lack of knowledge and critical reflection. She is a victim of the system that she actively defending for, and I trust countless many others have done the same.
better late than never i guess? the liberal influence in tech is so heavy that it takes a huge amount of work to deprogram yourself.
I had to give up multiple times with higher education thanks to unstable housing. I've actually been shamed for it during job interviews, even though I had a ton of job experience
Hello Alice, this is a good video. Lots of people think that it's not worth it anymore, and you can have a bachelors degree from Yale, but you can be working as a day shift manager at Walmart.
Back in 1985, having college degree meant that you would get a high paying full-time job, a house, a new car and a family. 40 years later, a college degree isn't enough anymore as it's own, you need other applicable skills, and now you don't even need a degree for some jobs.
Having a college degree is still good and it's a must for many jobs, but college needs to be affordable and better prepare students for the outside world after school.
I remember watching a video back in the GFC. There was a PhD grad who was looking for a job and he was ranting that no one cared about his education at all. He felt like he did it all for nothing.
I'm so happy you got the Squarespace sponsorship, it's a nice constant in my viewing experience of your videos
Saw this one early on Patreon, as a former Sabine regular it was a lovely crossover event
Thank you for the overview of why academia is overstressed, have already forwarded this one to friends :)
I think I waited so many years to find a UA-cam channel like yours. The questions and the answers are something so intelligent and yet so obvious in a way. Hope you gonna grow bigger for enlightenment of people.
You are definitely one the only that speaks about politics without getting me bored, angry or frustrated (specially living in France, and listening to traditional medias).
I’m making a fiction about social subjects like this problem of access to education, and you are a great inspiration.
Thanks a lot !
Sabine's views on capitalism and gender ideology, and honestly just about anything, are really not worth considering. She's a huckster. Even when she's right, there are still far better, more reliable, and less problematic sources of information out there.
I hate it when scientists think they can give their opinion on any and every topic. Physicists talking about biology is particularly infuriating because they cannot seem to grasp the levels of complexity in living systems. The concept of emerging properties is beyond them.
@@alejandramoreno6625 the concept of emergent properties is most certainly not beyond them. however you're still right that they're often grossly wrong when they speak outside their field like that.
@@birbeyboop Exactly, she has done research and work on quantum physics which deals with emergent properties, but hey, I guess regularly checking your epistemological coherence isn't something Sabine is too concerned about.
@@alejandramoreno6625
I sometimes get the feeling that they're basically operating on the stereotype that physics is the "smart people science," where the next level down is chemistry, and then biology falls below that, and then psychlogy (or especially sciences like sociology) are the "dumb people sciences." So they're like "I mastered physics, therefore biology should be a cakewalk" and just make assumptions because "how hard can it be?"
It makes me really sad to watch a good friend of mine dropping out of academia because she can't bear the mental and financial pressure. She was so close to finishing her PHD.
Her boyfriend is absolute lower class economically speaking and he also quit in his last semester of his master degrees and is now doing shitty low-paid jobs because he has difficulties getting a solid job with his geography bachelor.
And I personally was quitting right after the bachelor in social sciences because I was struggling with my health at that time and financially wise. Now I'm working in an absolutely boring office with no more possible career steps in front of my and I feel like im getting more stupid every day.
It's hard seeing my lower class friends in their situations knowing that they could have made so much more out of their live. Myself included.
This system is so f'ed up....
I felt this I can't even go to college even tho the first year is litearlly only 3500$ and the next 3 years is 1500 each lol I also feel like I'm getting more stupid everyday😂
Goddamn a geography BS is almost as useless as my MS in CS.
Going into PhD in pure maths next year here in Poland, I'm very worried about the "grant wars" we're experiencing in academia. Scientific fields without a clear and straightforward application to technology or industry (including pure math!) are kinda being starved to death, there's little money to be made and very little incentive to stay and do research.
On the other hand, the alternative for me with my skillset is to go into finance, insurance or banking - none of which are particularly interesting or appealing tbh
I flipped burgers and made coffee with so many college grads it was f****** ridiculous. I myself am not academically inclined. I know it would be a waste of money on me. Becoming a business owner instead. Back when I started High School in 2005 I knew that the new high school diploma was going to be an associate's degree
PhD dropout here, I was also very disenchanted when very soon I found out that I have to survive another 4 years on ridiculously small scholarship and have to write papers just for the sake of having enough publications and mz department did not take care at all about our well being let's say, I was mostly just exploited as a cheap work force.
I like this student's speech. Glad people starting to call out all this bullsh*t C:
As a scientist in my first year of college I caught that misery very fast…I’ll never forget that I went to the library to research a topic I was fascinated by..and my colleague was in panic she thought some professor asked for this and she didn’t know…I said I’m here for myself…and the shock in her eyes says it all….” Really ..?.?.you read Einstein for your sake? without being forced to?”
Yes I do and this why I’m here…isn’t that everyone else’s intention??.? I was so naive..and very confused…why thousands of my colleagues were attending science classes and loathing every moment of it?.…their depression almost reached me…I felt strange to be in there by full choice…
I think it was a mistake to encourage everyone to go to college and incentivize these types of people to do well, especially in research heavy fields like science.
during the time of newton, there was no systematic peer review or grant applications, the field emergently regulated itself
@@ezzy2254 Peer review has to be created due to the prevalence of fraudulent science at that time. However, in light of the recent scandals in Iv league universities, we now know that peer review is not enough.
10:50 College is not an enriching experience. It's a chance to watch thousands of dollars leave your bank account, while your fingers fall asleep on your laptop, trying to get a positive score from someone, who is so unskilled, that they decided to be a teacher.
Let's just build our own cool new, self sustaining towns with organic food.
I, too, come from a working class family. At the age of 25, I went to a well known uni and didn't fit in. There were younger students who came from rich backgrounds. One of things I learned (perhaps because I was older and struggling) was that many people don't acknowledge that learning is in itself the joy. A rare joy. And while someone might say the Internet is filled with knowledge, how do you discern what is garbage and what is truth? One needs an education to do this mental dance. Alice Cappelle, you are a wise young person. In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm wrote ". . . The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. . . . To be sure, thinking without knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but 'information' alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it." (1941). So in some ways, things have not changed as much as we might think.
I would say that uni is the only place where you truly learn critical thinking. And even if it doesn't directly lead you to a career, it has prepared you to navigate the mass of information that we encounter every day. Without the ability to question everything and to estimate which opinions and researches are better founded than others you are really lost.
@@Liisa3139 Exactly!
@@Liisa3139 That is incredibly elitist.
"Capitalism prevents innovation more then enables it" Merci!
No, I disagree. Maybe it is not the innovation you are seeking. It's very true that Big Pharma generates more profit keeping people sick than healthy. However, in any other economic system, especially communism, the party dictates what needs to be invented. Even a Big Tech company like FaceBook is questionable, but if it wasn't there, we may not have had instant messengers, enough data to feed LLM, or in the case of UA-cam, be able to share lectures and critiques.
It's really, really, shallow to think Capitalism prevents innovation. A communist system is far more limited and every invention or innovation serves the Party in limited people's freedoms. Unless you have anything positive to say about "Social Credit".
If you can control the flow of knowledge you control the masses.
From academia to mass media.
Basically, THE reason to go to college is to give an HR person an orgasm resulting in a job offer.
I entered my professional life by connecting with people. I did well as a software developer in the accounting domain. Somehow I got sucked into systems engineering for state of the art 911 backend development… and prospered there. All without a degree.
and there you go, turning the wheel like the rest of em
I don't know, man. I'm doing a Bcom in Accounting and now I have such a clear, intuitive understanding of not only how businesses function/fail but also how an economy functions/fails. That being said, maybe I could have learned it all somewhere online but, self learning has it's own challenges and not everyone can overcome them.
Loved the video :) Academia feels like quite an intimate topic to me as well because, similarly to Mohamed's case, social and economic conditions made me quit my academic career (at least for now) too, and it's so frustrating to see how society - in my country as well - apparently strives towards privatization, seeing education sytems as a competition between private sectors looking to create income, instead of making it the universal right that, imo, education should be. For me, the total "commodification" of higher education is the highest of modern society/capitalist dangers, as it is through professional formation that people start to reach some form of freedom and critical thinking abilities as well and creating vanguard innovation, so limiting it to the whealthy classes is, for me, the biggest enemy to subjects' effective change and true emancipation.
Capitalism will drag us all back into the medieval feudalism before it willingly gives up it's unilateral control over our lives.
College is a good investment for those majoring in STEM careers. As for those who crave a liberals arts education and high quality debate - all of these things are available with a library card and a good set of friends.
The second sentence can also be said for computer science/engineering (part of STEM after all). Almost all of what you need is on the internet, even more accessible than a library and friends (since you need to get up for library and touch the grass to have friends, but internet is pretty much free in terms of the energy used). Actually, I have learnt more in computer science in my high school years when I just read anything programming related on the internet compared to uni where I ground mindlessly. It can also pay well but I want to quote one of my teachers: "(...) They (a large set of instructions in the CPU not used by most programs but used mostly in high performance programs like games and simulators like vector instructions) are always used for malicious purposes: making people addicted to games, killing people with weapons etc." Well, I can also say that the remaining small set of instructions are also not used for benevolent reasons, they are mostly used to steal our attention span to convert us to mindless robots and similar reasons. The work is usually unethical, but of course there is always free software which is ethical but does not pay at all.
Where do you go to make friends?? STEM careers are not the ticket they used to be.
@@LuisFlores-mc2tc It can be very tough to make friends. But here's some advice. As you go through life whether it be HS, work, meeting people online, bars, church, pickup sports, etc. you will always meet interesting people, not everyone but at least a few. Grab their phone number and stay in touch! There are a lot people that we meet over the course of our lives, but for one reason or another we allow these people to slip away. Put in the effort and you can create a world for yourself more vibrant than any liberal arts college.
@@LuisFlores-mc2tc fr. STEM has too much competition these days. There aren't enough entry level positions for everyone and many people seem to have crazy resumes. The STEM shortage isn't real.
Liberal arts are for the Educated , the wise and the critical .
I dropped out of college in my early 20s but have recently felt called to maybe finish an ecology degree. unfortunately though, most of the lucrative jobs that an ecology degree could lead to are essentially aiding and abetting the destruction of the environment. for example working with the forestry service involves helping logging companies choose where to extract lumber from next. (and for those of you about to type “they replant the trees after they chop them down”: a forest isn’t just trees, it’s an ecosystem. when you destroy a forest you destroy the food and shelter for countless species. their populations will dwindle in the 20+ years it takes for those trees to grow back. additionally, they only plant trees that they want to harvest, no hardwoods. and hardwood trees like oaks are keystone species vital to keeping our food webs alive.)
As a teacher, I see my older students being stuck deciding between "Risking it working without a degree" or "Risking accruing college debt". I was taught by my parents, and my education, that education is a form of socioeconomic mobility. But, now I realize that the need for socioeconomic mobility itself was the problem from the beginning. I still believe an Education is an exceptionally important thing. But a "Schooling" less so. Learning is endlessly valuable, but it shouldn't HAVE to be how cultures solve the plaque of capitalism, and works best outside the traditional school framework.
i come from a worker background .. my parents where so short in money .. they couldn't support me at all, so i finished my higher ed with roughly 35k debt in a european country with "free" higher ed (you have to rent living space, eat food and live, next to a 50-60h week of lectures, preparations and programming) .. everything worked out for me but people forget so often "free" isn't "free" because student debt in the US always includes a dorm room and their living expenses they accumulated .. yes 35k is a very different story to 150k but you still need money to survive
This comment section is full of people complaining about industry and academia only caring about profit, and then complaining about their own job being unprofitable.
Because capitalism forces them to value things they otherwise wouldn't.
My parent's were 15 and 17 when i was born. My father worked in a California steel mill and later as a union machinist. Eventually they had 3 more children. The last was my sister, born when I was 13. My mother and father made many sacrifices that allowed my family to live a lower-middle class lifestyle. Starting out we did live in government housing for a year in a mostly black neighborhood. By the time I was 6 we moved to a nicer neighborhood and were one of the few mexican/american families on the block. I moved out when i was 19, attended university and began my first professional job in the mid 90's. I didn't really hit my stride until my 40's after entering into the corporate manufacturing world. I'm now a contractor with corporations in the EV and hydrogen space. As a contractor I have more freedom to innovate and solve problems for the salaried engineers and PhD's that are constrained by the direct corporate environment. I think its possible for a young driven individual to enter into a low level position at one of these companies. Its quite possible to go online and take python, matlab, EE, ME and software controls courses to begin developing systems. After a few years start a small business specializing is some segment of the industry. Innovation is very slow at the corporate level. Using this to your advantage, work on small projects for larger companies. The business can start generating revenue in a few years in the $500k to $1m range. Early on while in the entry level position, the corporation might even pay for your education with an affiliated university. So there is a way for a motivated individual to bypass college now due to the wealth of information online. This would have been quite impossible only a couple decades ago. If you plan to be a corporate manager that sits in meetings 6 hours a day, they by all means attend university. You'll need those laurels to live on when the business begins to downsize.
You are doing good work mate, for an audience a bit younger than I (born 1957) who has a government paid university education in Australia (incomplete) and has an Associate Diploma in Lab technology (microbiology) acquired many years later (2004) than my uni. entrance and deferral in 1975 -1976, in Australia. I'm male and I am free. No kids, no partner, and no credit card or mortgage. I chose to get myself "spayed" when I was 10 because even then with 3.5 billion people and in knowledge of the extinction of many species (Steller's Sea Cow, Great Auk, Thylacine, Passenger Pigeon) I though the family cat wasn't as much of a handicap to biodiversity. Obviously, I had to wait a while to acquire the surgical certainty NOT to add to the population. No regrets, with my friendship still existing with 3 "prefabricated" families (one of which made the appointment with the scalpel most ethical decision I ever made, with 4 kids already) and I am sure the species will not lose anything especially important with the end of my particular gene line. Totally free, no one else has to carry any of the trouble I may have acquired through the decades.
Anyway, I loved to study, I crave information and value data, and anyone of either gender and on any spectrum of variation between them can do themselves no wrong through its acquisition. It will benefit this world on its evolution toward a civil society no matter what career, or not, an education can provide them. Knowing stuff helps social intercourse, provides communication skill and wisdom, clear thinking, and education through an institution built to the task or the school of life which sometimes teaches fraud, will fortify escape from being easily fooled by the many lies, illusions, delusions and outright hoax they will come across.
The more complex our world becomes, the more specialist it will require. There is so much information within systems that no single human being could know all there is to know, or how to solve technical problems or systems failure from a book of instructions or an owners' manual. The polymath of Archimedes or Newton's time cannot be so broad stream today or tomorrow (assuming the future of our habitat permits one, which is another good reason to get into higher education) because too much information requires more than one human brain. Despite Google or Ai.
How will we ever learn to communicate with Humpback whale or Octopus without people being trained in coding, language, marine biology, and mollusc physiology?
Thank you, Ms Alice Cappelle. Education for sake of education needs to be desired by all. One way or another, it matters now and into the future.
We will never know everything but knowing nothing can get us killed by dirty water.
you wrote beautifully. thank you for your comment, I feel like I gained wisdom.
i'm a physics phd who somehow ended up working in marketing. At least it's marketing for a company that makes scientific test equipment so I get to use a bit of my expertise, but yeah i'm making at least twice what i'd be making as a postdoc with a much less toxic work environment. it truly sucks out there for anyone wanting to do real research.
The bedrock of society is literally money and status. and working your butt off.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
I like how your videos have improved overtime.🙂
When I was completing the internship capping my master’s in school counseling, I made up a bar graph to display in the high school guidance office I was working in that I meant to show more education = higher income. However, the data I used was gendered male/female, and ended up showing another, more interesting pattern; females consistently had to have one level higher of education than males to make the same money; all the way from males making the same without graduating high school as females made of they had, up to males making the same with a bachelor’s degree that females made with a graduate degree! This would rather neatly explain why females go to post-secondary education more; and stay there longer! 😯
my professor said this a decade ago, he was my favourite very smart guy almost everything he said came true. He said it was a money grab to meet rich people.
It seems like this is really a clash of interests between the college “intellectual/social” elite and the college “economic” elite. In America most of our rich go to university, it’s just they go for different reasons (getting rich).
There are less exploitative places I can go to burn a bunch of money and get told I’m not good enough for my efforts.
- Dropout working in their degree field, making more than their parents at the same age, while also having less opportunities.
Wow i completely agree with those students from paris agritech! After graduating with an engineering degree i felt simillarly. Most of the problems in our world that need solving have a root cause thats political, no new gadget/invention could possibly create the changes i wish to see in the world.
Thank you so much for the video and the messages. UA-cam needs more youtubers and speakers like you.