I agree (and I wrote) I don't recommend taking on a lot of debt and it's not for everyone. One difference today is how high tuition is for undergraduates so you have a good point based on that alone. I realize there are a lot of other problems too ... see quoted excerpts below ...
When I went to college I had partial scholarships and tuition was a lot lower than today. Even then the college president said unashamedly he had to raise tuition so the reputation of the school would remain among the best.
But in some fields, particularly sciences, there are fellowships in PhD programs so you don't necessarily need to go into debt. I remember when I first learned this when I was taking college courses during summer vacation after my junior year in high school, it changed my plans for the future, it was like discovering a new continent, it opened up such vast possibilities for me. Years later on my grad school applications I said straight out I would not go if I had to pay. Where I went, students had to be Teaching Assistants for one course for one semester, and work in labs until we decided where we wanted to do our thesis research. The thesis research is under the direction of a research professor so it's like working as a paid research associate but they eventually give you a degree. (Some corporations have similar associations with universities, you work for a company doing research but you get a degree from a university - (I think the company pays tuition to the university.).
I don't know where being self directed and critical thinking skills come from. I suppose they could be learned but in me they were innate. I was always fascinated by science and computers - they were my play and subject matter for reading. I would borrow books of science experiments from school and I remember mooning over an ad for a programmable calculator in Scientific American for months before I was able to buy one. The personal computer had not been invented then. Before that I had toy "computers" some you had to wire logic circuits yourself some were mechanical you "programmed" with pegs to add in binary.
If my parents did anything to encourage my intellectual curiosity it was to teach me to read at a younger age than most children and encourage me to read and share their values that learning was "good", and provide a safe quiet home where I could learn.
As a kid trying to earn money, my sales skills were not very good. I didn't like to ask for a lot of money for my labor so I was always underpaid for cutting grass and shoveling snow. Same thing years later when I worked for myself as an engineering consultant. I enjoy helping people too much. As an adult I think most things are over priced (except equity shares and real estate during a recession!) I don't know what to spend my money on because I don't like to get ripped off and I think most things are a rip off. My talents in "business" lay more in cutting costs, improving efficiency, managing money, and investing - which I make use of managing my personal finances and investments.
I don't have kids but
I have heard that school theses days in some ways does more harm than good. If I had children, I would be careful about how they were educated (as my parents were with me - my family moved to a suburb with good public schools when private school in the city became too expensive).
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In his book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, a liberal, explains how progressive students have been intellectually damaged by identity politics:
(Excerpt by Ed Driscoll)
As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.
Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.
...
Adam MacLeod wrote in Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
...
"Dr Joanna Williams, a lecturer in higher education at Kent University ...
... said that if girls are instilled with a mindset of victimhood at a young age, it can set them back later in life. “When women go out into the world of work and experience obstacles, rather than persevering they think ‘oh these are the insurmountable barriers I was told about'."
...
Dr Williams said that the narrative continues at university where students are told that there is a "rape culture" or some kind of "epidemic" of sexual assault on campus.
...
“It is very difficult for women to present themselves as powerful, strong and capable if they think they need to be wary and anxious," she said.
...
4:25
Camille Paglia: “It’s really started at the level of public school education. I’ve been teaching now for 46 years as a classroom teacher, and I have felt the slow devolution of the quality of public school education in the classroom.”
...
“What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!”
~2:04
Camille Paglia: My generation of the 1960's, when I arrived in college in 1964 there were parietal rules in place so that the women in my dorm had to sign in at 11:00 at night. The men could run free. It was my generation that rose up and said that we wanted to be treated equally and we want freedom. And the colleges said the world is a dangerous place. You could be attacked you could be raped. We said, "Give us the freedom to risk rape. Freedom is much more important than protection and safety. And that's what young people have given up today.
~5:59
Christina Hoff Sommers: And right now the fashion is the identity politics, intersectionality, this is all the rage, and its the premise of this theory it's the idea that all the oppressions intersect with one another and form this matrix of oppression. And so young people in a typical gender studies class now learn that they inhabit a society that is this matrix of oppression and depending on your identity you might be advantaged so you have unearned privilege or you might be burdened because of your race or maybe your disability or your gender or preference and on and on. But underneath it all is this assumption that the United States is a white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchal oppressive society. And in order to liberate ourselves we have to, I don't even know what they want to do - because it's all - maybe blame one another and form - have little feuds, on social media and on campus.