It doesn't. It costs money to skip a lot of the effort and have someone guide you through a curriculum and give you direct guidance and feedback on how to get that knowledge.

I have an Engineering degree, everything I learned there could absolutely be learned by someone curious poking around on the internet for videos, papers, and course slides that you'll probably need to read alongside a wiki page. They tend to come up pretty quickly once you're familiar enough with a field to start investigating one level deeper from a basic high school education.

It doesn’t.

It takes time and effort to gain more knowledge. It has never been cheaper or more accessible to acquire knowledge than it is today.

To increase your intelligence, is another matter all together.

I guess you're talking about the US.

Well, everything costs money there: education, health, safety... It's capitalist dystopia.

In Australia University used to be free. At some point they realised that Asia is close and has a virtually limitless supply of rich parents who want to pay big money for their kids to be lawyers and doctors.

Education is now one of Australia's main exports.

Thats about certificated stuff from school. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today.

It doesn't. It costs money to get the diploma that's proof of your smarts. The Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz didn't actually get a brain, he got a diploma.

My son is a committed cinephile, and has systematically watched nearly every movie ever made, in any country, in any era ( it seems). He's an expert, by anyone's estimation. He just started back to college for a degree in Film Studies, because while he has the knowledge, in order to get a job teaching film, or working in an archive, etc., he needs the degree.

So you aren't buying the knowledge, any person who makes a serious commitment can get the knowledge, you are paying for an organization ( a school) to endorse your knowledge. Kind of a Certificate of Authenticity for your intelligence.

I would argue that its rare for education to make you smarter, it mostly makes you more knowlegable.

Knowledge is mostly free though. You can get it from the internet, from the library etc. A lot of what you are paying for is the certification - some places let you just sit the exam I think.

The library is free, my dude

Here in Sweden education is free, and the government provides a (small) monthly payout to students.

It doesn't.

You need to study to be smart and studying is free.

Formal education isn't for education but for the formal paper. There is so much information on the web, just learn from that. Also, libraries often times have material other than physical books

It only costs money to get the little piece of paper that says you did the thing and are therefore smarter. 🙃

Because knowledge is power.

But also it depends. Learn on the job is a thing too in some industries, and in some people can do quite well for themselves here.

It also costs money to make money, if you have a lot of it you can make it work for you and make even more than someone who doesn't have it. This is why kids of rich ass parents get it so easy.

There are a lot more quality free learning resources than people realise.

It doesn't benefit the ruling class if too many of the wrong people access education; they may get ideas.

*in the US. In Germany a semester at my university costs about 300 Euros and that includes cheaper lunch and a ticket to use all public transport in the whole of Germany.

It doesn't if you know how to read. I don't think of college as paying to learn; it's paying to prove to others that you possibly have learned something. You can just learn things outside of school on your own. You just won't have a degree proving it.

I'd argue it doesn't, and moreover you cannot buy intelligence.

Sure, you can buy some books with some stuff in it and memorize that stuff, or pay for a class on some stuff and test well, but critical thinking skills seem to either innately exist, or not (depending on the individual in question), within us.

I've met people with pieces of paper that proclaim them to be certified smart that are dumb as rocks but were simply able to move through the system well enough to fool people, and people who have no such paper who are more intelligent than the former could ever hope to be. Shit happens.

A man I respect quite a lot used to say that college should pay a full-time wage to the students. It should be challenging, it should be a real education (which a lot of modern college is not), and in exchange for that, if you are improving your understanding of the world and your ability to contribute to society, that should be something that society pays you a pretty decent wage for, because it's a fucking valuable activity.

Getting smarter doesn't really cost much. Public libraries exist, go read books and get smarter.

University degrees though... Yeah, those are fucked up.

Or you could emigrate to the EU, where higher education is free.

It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved in higher education, then the republicans got big mad about that and changed the rules because they're racist pieces of shit. They would rather make everyone suffer if it hurts one person who isn't a white christian republican.

There's more detail but that's the short version.

Libraries are free.

Many libraries and community centers offer free classes depending on the subject. Local clubs can offer classes. Lots of youtube classes are free, like Khan Academy.

What you’re paying for is the degree on top of the education. A checkmark in a box that employers use to weed out people that don’t play the game of jumping through the hoops.

It is not about getting smarter. It is about transferring knowledge. For that, the teaching person must a) have the knowledge, and b) the skills to actually transfer it. Both do not come easy and cheap.

You simply pay a professional person money for professional work. And sometimes it is really, really worth it. I learned one programming language in an expensive three day course - from the person who wrote the actual tools. This was intense. The amount of knowledge and insight gained was marvelous. And well worth the money.

Disclaimer: I 100% support "free" healthcare and "free" education.

Being a teacher is a job. Being a college professor is a job. Being a nurse is a job. Being a janitor for a college campus is a job. People need money and benefits to do jobs. We've not yet achieved a post-scarcity economy where people can work without being reimbursed for their efforts.

Anyone who labels the goal of providing publicly-funded education or publicly-funded healthcare as "free" is either arguing in bad faith or too naive to understand what the goal should be. As a society we should provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to all humans who ask for it. For the good of all humans. But it's something we all have to collectively fund.

Essentially, because it takes labor to create educational material. Unless you own slaves labor isn't free. And in fact with the modern library and Internet access I'd argue self educating is more accessible than ever in history.

formal education feels like it was fully co-opted by "the market"

If you want to join "the market" (have a job and get paid for it), you need formal education
To get formal education, you need money
To get money, you need to join "the market" or have someone who's "in" to pay for you

As for "getting smarter", that's different from formal education