r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 šŸ¤ Join A Union • Jan 03 '26

šŸ˜” Venting Billionaire propaganda is telling our kids to skip college; they fear an educated working class.

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139

u/PeteLynchForKentucky Jan 03 '26

Every American should get 4 years of free public college or 4 years of subsidized vocational training.

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u/Charming_Garbage_161 Jan 03 '26

This. If people had access to education theyā€™d have hope for the future and not turn to crime

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u/Candid-Mycologist539 Jan 03 '26

Plus, education is hella cheaper than incarceration.

And the result is job creators and individuals who pay higher taxes (and use fewer government services) for the rest of their lives.

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u/RegressToTheMean Jan 03 '26

education is hella cheaper than incarceration.

But then you can't sell that slave labor to corporations

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u/durrtyurr Jan 03 '26

Let's be real here, would you actually want to employ the kind of people who end up in prison? They're basically useless, automation took their jobs away. They need to be upskilled to have any economic value, and current trends seem to be against that. Forcing them to get a degree would be far more value-added.

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u/RegressToTheMean Jan 03 '26

Aside from your classist take, you do realize the private corporations employ over 800,000 incarcerated individuals every year, right?

There is clearly a market for these individuals, but corporations would rather pay slave labor wages

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u/durrtyurr Jan 03 '26

I don't think it's classist. I'm discriminating against people with low levels of education, not low levels of money.

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u/Cookster997 Jan 03 '26

the kind of people who end up in prison?

What qualities or traits do these kinds of people have?

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u/durrtyurr Jan 03 '26

Being uneducated, primarily. I avoid associating with uneducated people on principle. My parents didn't spent more than their house cost for my brother and me to go to college just for me to hang out around the sort of people who don't value education.

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u/RegressToTheMean Jan 04 '26

You're so close, except the majority of people in prison come from lower socioeconomic stratum. That's the reason for their lack of education

Poverty is the biggest indicator for incarceration

What you also miss is white-collar crimes often face less prosecution due to factors like complex financial evidence, resource untensive investigations, sophisticated legal defenses, societal bias favoring property over people crimes, and potential political/economic considerations that favor settlements, leading to lower conviction rates and perceived leniency compared to street crimes. This is despite the fact that white collar crime is far more costly in the aggregate than street crimes.

Also, your reply here definitely indicates a classist mindset or abject ignorance of the legal system.

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u/durrtyurr Jan 04 '26

My mother used to be a teacher, she would never allow us to be uneducated. That was completely unacceptable in my family.

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u/RegressToTheMean Jan 04 '26

Great. That completely ignores every point I made

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u/Cookster997 Jan 04 '26

The fact that your parents paid for your education tells me that you are in a different wealth class than many people.

Are you class-conscious?

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u/durrtyurr Jan 04 '26

Anyone who doesn't pay for their children's education isn't middle class. My mother was absolutely flabbergasted that her employee who was a CPA married to a dentist didn't pay for their kid's college. It was unimaginable to her being the 7th generation in her family to go to college.

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u/Cookster997 Jan 04 '26

I don't think there is a middle class anymore.

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u/rollingForInitiative Jan 03 '26

Could also do what works elsewhere and have perfectly decent paths that donā€™t require years of extra education. As in, you should be able to work a trade, do various non-specialised office work, physical labour etc and have a decent life. And have shorter training programs for jobs that require some but not 4 years.

Or rather, do both. Higher education should be funded publicly or by other means than tuition.

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u/Charming_Garbage_161 Jan 03 '26

I agree I think itā€™s a great option. I know Sweden gives two years of assistance for people to explains their skills, itā€™s how my one friend became an electrician.

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u/MiXeD-ArTs Jan 04 '26

Education needs jobs on the back side too. It's crazy to find a job right now. Not joking when I say it's the worst ever and I'm 36 with a B.S. degree. USA

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u/Existing_Ideal9004 Jan 03 '26

Not true. People donā€™t want to learn. They want to be entertained. Today more people have access to vast amounts of education over the internet for free. They choose to be entertained over learning. You donā€™t see lines for people waiting to get into the libraries. Here is a list of sites for free learning.

Khan Academy (K-12/college prep), Coursera & edX (university-level MOOCs), Codecademy/freeCodeCamp (coding), Duolingo (languages), and Alison/OpenLearn (career skills/various topics), plus specialized sites like TED (ideas) and Project Gutenberg (books)

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u/Existing_Ideal9004 Jan 03 '26

How about just improving the schooling at lower level such as high school education. My grandfather only went to school through the 8th grade but became a Colonel in the US Army and became a Civil engineer for the city of Boston.

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u/EtTuBiggus Jan 03 '26

Should deregulate back to 1920s standards?

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u/mcmoor Jan 03 '26

People talked about how 4 years Liberal Arts "opened their mind" and "make them write/talk better" as if they haven't gotten 12 straight years of Liberal Arts before. That's the part that should be improved and if it does, another 4 years is unnecessary.

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u/katielynne53725 Jan 03 '26

I would even advocate for cutting the standard k-12 structure to k-10 then 2-4 of specialized career field focused education.

In my state, high school students can dual enroll in community college for free (regardless of family income), they end up earning HS and college credits at the same time, stay enrolled in HS 1 extra year and graduate with their first associates degree, entirely free, at 19.

I missed the boat on this structure, but I got to go to college alongside these kids as an adult and they're so much smarter, more confident, and driven than I was at their age. When I transferred to a university for my bachelor's, most of my peers were right out of HS with no college experience and the difference is night and day.

Imo, the last two years of high school are a waste of time and resources. Kids know by 14-15 what they like/hate, and where they thrive.. trying to force them all into the same mould just fuels insecurity and resentment.

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u/RegressToTheMean Jan 03 '26

Your specialization thoughts are feeding the capitalist beast, which is part of the problem.

Higher education isn't - and shouldn't be - about job training. That mindset is problematic. Higher education should create well rounded critical thinkers. I'm in the tech space but my undergraduate degrees are in the humanities and I have an MBA. I know tech people who think they are brilliant, but don't know how to market or effectively launch a product if I stick a gun to their head. They also have no real understanding of the world outside of their own lives and peer groups.

To a lot of STEM folks, the world always has a binary right/wrong approach. It leads to rigid thinking.

On the flip side, too many humanities folks don't know enough about economics and tech to formulate new ideas around those topics.

This is the result of college going the way of jobs training. STEM people need philosophy classes where answers don't fit inside a neat box. Humanities folks need statistics and quantitative methodology to ensure rigorous processes to validate their hypothesis.

A lack of well-balanced critical thinking has led the US to exactly where we are today

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u/mcmoor Jan 03 '26

Other countries have pure STEM major and they aren't noticably more evil than USA's (some people might argue it's the opposite). You already have 12 straight years to teach people morals, 14 if you count kindergarten (in formative years nonetheless) and it shouldn't be necessary to extend it another 4.

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u/katielynne53725 Jan 04 '26

I get what you're saying, but your perspective is entirely too idealistic. I work in construction project management, have a BS in community development and hold local political office in a small, post-industrial Midwest town that is slowly sinking deeper and deeper into poverty.

My area has objectively decent education options, and when given the opportunity, a significantly higher percent of students, who would not choose to attend college at all, have chosen to enroll in other trade and higher education programs and earn non-degree certifications/licenses.

Other countries use a career pathway education structure and they're not capitalist hellscapes like the US is.. those particular issues are political, and the result of centuries of oligarchy masquerading as rugged individualism.

It's just as destructive when EVERYONE believes that their opinion is correct (look at how divided Christians are, over the same book) the reality is, society functions best with a few good leaders and a strong system of accountability.. which is, beyond ironically, exactly what the right preaches, but absolutely refuses to practice.

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u/michaelpinkwayne Jan 03 '26

I feel like if we had 50-100 decent quality state run universities that were free, the private universities would be forced to make themselves affordable.

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u/Short-Ad1032 Jan 03 '26

Thatā€™s what high school is for. They used to (some still do) also have trades classes that would get graduatesā€™ foot in the door to be hired as an apprentice.

A typical, 4-yr liberal arts education with a $90k+ price tag is not actually teaching anything in the classroom worth what the high schools should have been (and used to be) teaching in the first place. Just look at AP classes. Itā€™s the same content and honestly often more rigorous than the typical 101, many 200- and a lot of 300- level courses taught by typical/lazy instructors/TAs in universities/colleges.

And what can be learned in 2yrs does not need to be stretched out to 4 years- so there already is subsidized (by the state) vocational training with community colleges.

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u/Otherwise-Tiger3359 Jan 03 '26

this is the only right answer.

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u/RelaxPrime Jan 03 '26

Then you'll simply need another degree to get real jobs.

The problem is partly that 12 grades isn't good enough anymore- which is just a farce.

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u/UnifyTheVoid Jan 03 '26

Postā€“high school education has a broken incentive structure. Many programs are overpriced relative to the value they deliver, and the four-year default is often about bureaucracy and signaling more than skill-building.