Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
The marijuana comparison is not even close to the same thing.
In terms of harm done, no. Principle? Yeah? It’s best to stop further harm, but undoing past harms as well is even better.
It’s also important for dumb choices to have consequences. The systemic racism that brought the majority of the marijuana convictions is not even close in comparison to someone who borrowed money to get a degree that was never going to make a decent income.
The assumption that you should only do things that are profitable is faulty. I don’t want to live in a world where that’s true, and if you thought about it longer you probably also don’t. Assuming you like books, art, music, culture, etc.
People shouldn’t choose to take on debt that they can’t afford and free education will still get me all of that culture.
So free University only for majors you deem worthy? Or only for profit minded disciplines? MBAs yes, but art history no?
Besides, economic desperation makes people make poor choices, and I’d wager that most people taking on debt for education don’t consider it a poor choice. Often higher education is key to economic success, but given tumultuous economic conditions in the past decades…things haven’t panned out for everyone, which makes those decisions look worse in hindsight.
You can’t claim everyone with student loan debt has it because they’re a worthless hippie art student. The increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees made it more competitive to get jobs requiring those degrees, meaning people need to get them just to compete…so people wind up shackled with debt.
It’s free to be sympathetic to people who are in a tough situation, even if they bear some responsibility for it. We all do.
No, free university for whatever. It’s simply a better investment than fixing people’s past mistakes.