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You have quicker access to more information for less expense than the wealthiest student enjoyed 40 years ago. The Internet truly has changed everything.
You can learn everything there is to know in a typical high school or university course using materials you can find or buy over the Internet. You can buy textbooks on Amazon, watch videos on YouTube, and enroll in tutoring services. You can study in virtual and in-person peer groups. You can take practice exams on-line to gauge your skills. You can even watch recorded university courses!
But no matter how much you learn, you get pulled back into the formal educational system. Why? You need to prove your education to people you don’t know if you want to conduct business with them. And the only universally accepted proof of knowledge is the diploma/degree.
So, you can get an education without the school, but you cannot get the proof of education without the school.
Which means, the product being sold is the diploma or the degree, not the education.
Is sitting in a classroom the only way to learn? In the past, if you wanted to learn the Japanese language and culture, you took courses at the university. Now, you just fly to Japan and teach a course on English.
If you want to learn to program computers, you download any of dozens of freely available software development environments, and then just watch YouTube videos and read blogs. You can order books from Amazon covering just about any computer language. You can write software and upload it to the Internet for sale, and at no cost for several platforms.
You can learn mathematics at Khan Academy or by watching videos on YouTube or from reading books on Amazon.
Compare the options you have today to the options you’d have available to you in the 1950s. In the 1950s, most people were limited to schools and libraries as their sole sources for knowledge. The Internet, inexpensive airline travel, and amazing technologies have changed everything. The falling price and expanded availability of educational material is evidence of the end of the era of classroom-based education.
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Proof in the Grade-Based Education system comes in the form of a high school diploma and a university degree. Employers often ask job candidates for one or both documents, depending on the job requirements. The educational organizations that grant you a diploma or degree hold a monopoly on proof of education. Only they may issue a diploma or degree. Therefore, in order for you to have physical evidence of your educational achievements to present to an employer, you must pay the costs demanded by the monopoly.
And what are those costs?
According to the Education Data Initiative, states spend between $8,000 and almost $25,000 per K-12 student. The National Center for Educational Statistics puts the average total cost per pupil at approximately $15,000 overall in 2019-2020. With so many variables in the funding of schools, an exact number would be difficult to come by, but you get the idea.
Taking the average NCES and multiplying by 12, the number of years of school from grades 1-12, you get $180,000 per student. You see how much money goes into educating our children just up through high school graduation.
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics states 62% of 2022 high school graduates were enrolled in colleges or universities. That’s an impressive number of people continuing their education after high school. People continuing their education in a four-year program can expect to pay about $8,000 for tuition on the low end and as much as $24,000 on the high end, and that’s the in-state costs. Out-of-state tuition costs can be triple that of in-state tuition costs. And this is public schools. Tuition at private universities can cost much more.
On top of the tuition costs come housing, food, books, fees, and travel costs. These expenses add several thousands of dollars to the tuition cost.
By the time you graduate from a four-year degree program, you have invested four years of your life and many tens of thousands of dollars. If you took on debt to pay for college, add the interest costs to the total bill.
You do all this to get a single document, the degree. Was it worth it? It depends. Here are some interesting statistics from ResumeBuilder.com.
Twenty-eight percent (28%) of employed college graduates work in a job that only requires a high school diploma. Twenty-one percent (21%) of recent graduates work in a job unrelated to their major field of study. The study continues with eye-opening statistics about the true value of the various types of degrees.
If you were to sink a hundred thousand dollars into an investment you spent four years developing, what level of return would you expect to earn? Suffice it to say, earning a university degree involves more risk than most people realize.
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Like any monopoly, educational institutions have raised prices well beyond what would be possible if their products competed in a free and fair marketplace. The price of the Grade-Based Education system won’t come down on its own. The price may never come down, even in the face of stiff competition, due to the inefficiencies built into that system.
But you need that proof of education, and you must follow the rules of the monopoly power to obtain it. The monopoly states you’ll attend seven years of secondary school and four years at a university to receive your proofs of education, so you comply. Even when you know most of what you’ve learned you could have learned on your own quicker and for less money had you just done it on your own.
You need that document when negotiating contracts with employers and clients. These documents improve your standing in the negotiations. An official document from an accredited institution of learning vouches for your knowledge, skills, and talents to people who don’t know you. What you know is of no value if nobody believes you know it. You won’t need a diploma or degree if the people requesting your services know you well and trust in your abilities. That is the value of the official document. That is why you do business with the monopoly.
The cost of education is dropping even as the cost of Grade-Based Education is increasing. Getting an education takes time and effort, but it need not take the amount of money and time demanded by the Grade-Based Education system. To break the monopoly on proof of education held by the Grade-Based Education system, you’ll need an alternative form of proof of education.
Copyright © 2022 Ken Judkins
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