no one wants to go to college anymore 

Naturally after this video ended I got a PragerU ad about how college is bad because it teaches anticapitalist propaganda.

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

"Nobody does class solidarity like the rich" That line is Iconic

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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. ❤

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

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.

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.

problems like this are why we need to build better systems of communal education. RU-vid lectures and essays are great, but this is also research projects, book clubs, academic forums, public libraries, film screenings, creating art...

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.

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.

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.

"nobody does class solidarity like the rich" soooo true

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.

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

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!

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"...

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.

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

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.

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.

Holy shit, those engineering grads unloaded both barrels in that ceremony.

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.

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

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.

I have a whole dissertation on career fairs and how there’s a profit based thinking in discussions around academia.

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.

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.

It's been heartbreaking watching one of my favourite science RU-vidrs 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.

Loved this video- even though I immediately felt depressed afterwards. The class war is real. 😢

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?

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

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.

i did not find college an enriching experience at all. like many i was reeled into it with the idea of "learning the things you're passionate about with a collective of like-minded people in a beautiful campus blah blah blah blah etc." come the day i went in there myself, the experience was exactly the opposite of everything that i was told. there was no passionate learning, because of disinterested professors with sticks up their butts. there were no like-minded people, everyone's only interest was to get whatever score they could get past 5/10 by cheating. that reminds me of another one of your videos where you mentioned how education has become transactional. everyone goes to school because of social obligations, thus it becomes a mere transaction of "i get the grades you want and you give me my diploma at the end". in my view, that has extended to university as well. there was no beautiful (broadly said) campus to engage in, it was just another neighborhood except the buildings are schools. the dorms were built and operated like prisons; me and my roommate barely had any space to walk around each other, and people coming in and out were catalogued carefully by security. along with many more every facet of college life felt like it was designed to bring me down, to discourage the actual intellectual effort that i was promised. where you said that governments are even paying people to go to college, i also had another experience, that this is only on paper. i was eligible for financial aid and to not having to pay the dorm room, because of my family's low income. however, when the time came to request these things, i was given obstacle after obstacle from the secretary's office: when i went to request financial aid, i first brought the paperwork that was listed on the school's website, only for them to tell me that one of those documents is from the wrong office. then i brought that document from the place they wanted, after which they said that document needs to cover a specific timeframe. i brought the document with the specific timeframe, after which they told me i need to bring the financial statements of my sibling who has been dead for years. when i told them that my sibling was dead, they told me to bring something else. on and on and on, there was always a new thing that these people needed to prove that i was poor. as for the dorm payment, i was sent between the secretary's office and social services, back and forth, over and over. social services said "the dean's office deals with this stuff, you need to go to the secretary". the secretary said "you need to go to social services". eventually, the deadline for handing in the paperwork needed passed. one quote with which i could describe the university experience is one from Peter Kropotkin: "Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state". prisons punish their inmates for the sake of it, and they justify this punishment through the supposed outcomes that it will have at the end: that the prisoner will be reformed and will not commit a crime again, they get a new chance to make a contribution to society, in the present. colleges put their students through unneeded suffering/struggle (and i'm not talking only about my experience here; every college student, graduate or dropout describes the academic part of college life in dreadful terms), again, for the sake of it, and they justify this suffering through the supposed outcomes that it will have at the end: that the student will be educated and they will get a new chance to make a contribution to society, in the future. one thing is certainly in common between a prisoner and a student though: after their "release", they will enter the world of streamlined exploitation, where their background will not matter to the exploiter. the prisoner may end up working a dead-end job for an employer that does not care about their past conviction. the student may end up working a job for an employer that required their degree, but every fresh graduate entering the job market has described hearing these words in one form or another: "forget everything you learned in college". and when things are presented this way, Kropotkin's quote shines in that he creates a premise where the definitions of "prison" and "university" are interwoven, and perhaps the only thing that the only difference between the two is their voluntarity: one goes to prison by force, another goes to university by choice. in the end, both people end up in the same place in the grand scheme of things, in a position of exploitation.

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

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.

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.

College being affordable would certainly help

The idea that college is merely a job training institute says a lot about our society.

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.

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.

I agree with Sabine 100% and I have an engineering PhD myself. The issue is, that a lot of these "anti academia" rants come from academics, like myself here. But in terms of practical advice, the truth is, without a degree the chances of getting an interesting and well paid job are very very small. Also, if you think "no I am going to start my own business" you often still need funding, which is gonna even 1000x harder to get without appropriate degrees. The main point of people like Sabine and myself is, that academia as an institution to pursue a career in, is terrible these days and kinda broken. However many of the degrees (esp. technical, scientific and law, medicine) are still HIGHLY useful and will continue to be so for a long time to come probably. Even people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg etc. who publically criticise academia.... just go have a look at all of their companies, literally anyone with a better position has science/engineering degrees.

@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. :/

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.

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.

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.

No matter how bad things get, losing hope will make you burn the world you wish to save.

I think I waited so many years to find a RU-vid 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 !

I went to university. Got a history degree. Work in a field adjacent (archive and research librarian). I hate it. I hate the low pay, the turning my interest into a necessity for money to survive. It sucks. I should have become an electrician or something so I could keep my passion a passion rather than a casualised nightmare with horrible colleagues.

One of the best episodes of this year, Alice!!! Keep talking about academia, please

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 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.

I know this is off-topic, but I really enjoyed the recent Deprogram podcast episode featuring Alice!

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.

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.

10:21 Absolutely not surprised by him being a typical Indian uncle who has a problem with ‘non-productive’ degrees.

I like how your videos have improved overtime.🙂

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.

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.

I could listen to this kind of rant all day. It's just reality

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.

1:55 Wow that’s quite an academic arc and honestly, WERK 🔥

This video was exactly the right length for handing up my laundry. Easily the most interesting version of hanging up my laundry in a while.

The whole internet is so dull, thank god we have Alice!!

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....

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.

I very much agree with Sabine, academia is broken in so many ways, doing a phd requires a lot of effort and some privilege to be financially and psychologically supported during the process.

Phenomenal. Simply phenomenal. Well written, produced, researched and presented. Zero criticisms from me.

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…

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.

One of your best, Alice. Thank you 🙏

Ah Alice 20min is not long enough!!! You explained this topic so well, and I would soooo love to hear you dive in to more of the details in a say 45min video.... hope this might be something you would consider for the future :)

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.

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.

The bedrock of society is literally money and status. and working your butt off.

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.

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.

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.

In my post "The Tension within Methods of Exchange" I say the following 2 things: In every exchange there is always this Tension between benefit (self or tribe) and benefit (society) that each party has to deal with - that decision about what they want out of the deal, whether they will work for benefiting the self OR benefiting society at large. These two choices are typically mutually exclusive and will drive a society towards either competition or cooperation, respectively. ...and... Methods of Exchange have a subtle yet powerful and compassionless value system visceral to it through the antagonism inherent to Competition which is: “Benefit (no matter the cost to Humanity or to the Environment)“

Ever since I started college everybody around me kept saying I should pursue an academic career, get a master's degree, a doctorate and be a professor. But the experiences I had in two different majors (one incomplete) were mostly horrible anxiety inducing, bordering on moral harassment. So once I graduated I was out of there and still don't feel like going back, but at the same time I feel I'm not good at anything else.

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.

It seems to me that capitalism is just a tool that is increasingly used to try to "solve" every problem. Is it a fair argument to state that capitalism does breed innovation, but not in all contexts? Your examples: regulation against exploiting academics or against abuse to patent law are inherently anti-capitalist, but encourage innovation doesn't mean capitalism itself stifles innovation in all contexts. It can be accurate to say capitalism can be used as an effective tool to encourage individuals even if it's not the only way you can encourage individuals to innovate. Regarding the cost of education. It may not be in competition with nationalist interests and may be aligned with capitalist interests if it means the elite require more proletariat masses to support the bourgeoisie. Making education expensive maintains the bourgeoisie hold on the upper class and discourages individuals from pursuing "non-value adding" disciplines that are currently seen as oversaturated. As contrast in demand skills like programming or trade may be encouraged by a lower cost, free, or paid incentives. I'd argue "the country" (rather those in power) don't want you to be enlightened, they want you to be useful. And it is not useful for them if it means you can't be used as easily for their needs.

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.

Thanks for articulating this so well.

"Capitalism prevents innovation more then enables it" Merci!

STEM subjects, and not even all of those, are the only subjects worth learning at formal schools anymore imo. I don't trust the institutions that are at the top and decide what will be on tests and what will be taught. Real education (education not paper degree) is gained from many places. Khan Academy is better than most Ivy league universities with the sole exception of making contacts and meeting other people interested in the same industry as you are. University is for making social networks, the internet is a better place to learn from though. One of my friends did very well with a chemistry major. He learned calculus 2 (a feared difficult math class) from Khan Academy the summer before he took the actual class. He did very well, the other students had difficulty with the teachers' strong accent.

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.

I would highly recommend todd mcgowan's latest book "alienation, why we shouldnt try to find ourselves". This book is a worthy answer to several of the points raised in this video.

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.

*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 they still have other ways of denying you...!!!

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

Great video! I, too, got an MA in US history, but I was then able to get a PhD in US history. For what it is worth, I am very thankful for your videos and appreciate the amount of work you put into them.

The freedom of research under a socialist workers state would be very liberating, especially if many workers states also existed in unison, global collaboration for the benefit of humanity and the planet.

Wow those graduates who spoke really nailed it.

Loved this video Alice!

THANK YOU FOR THIS