School = Brainwash?

Universities/Colleges are out to get your money. A lot of the required courses won't even help you in your field of study, but you're forced to take them and forced to dish out cash in classes that will never be of use to you. If you ever ask why the system is like this, you'll most likely get some lecture about how important it is to be a well rounded individual. That's fine and dandy, but that's what you spent 12 years of your life in school prior to university, to get an all around education in all fields before moving on to something you really want to focus on. Those with degrees get higher paying jobs, but end up having to pay off their school loans for the next 10 years anyway.

But that's digressing into an entirely different subject, I'd rather not hijack the thread for a discussion about this.

I suppose it depends entirely on what exactly is your field of study. I just looked at all the classes I took and would honestly be hard pressed to find one that I can say with absolute certainty won't be useful to me. You will find the occassional old theory that doesn't really apply anymore, but for econ purposes it's important for me to understand why that is. I don't know if that applies to other fields of study.

No offense, some of you are starting to sound pretty jaded about the education system in general. Of course colleges are out to get our money. In exchange I get information/knowledge/training/resources that are not readily available. You get insight from professionals, and get as much out of it as you can. Some people don't want to be a Google-for-brains. That is the true way to become a robot. Robots follow a specified and given way of doing things. How often do you do something that you simply accepted as true without giving it much thought? How often do you google something you don't understand? How often do you use a system or methodology you didn't create? When you begin to answer these questions, more and more is 'schooling' out of the picture. Realize you were more like a robot long before school even entered the picture. Some people want to rely on their own minds. At university, I was fed info like a robot, yes, but I figured out whether I was going to accept it or not, by doing my own research and critical thinking.

The average person uses systems as opposed to making them, tweaking them, etc. That is the true conformist. Of course, you will get college students who eat everything they are fed and don't question it. But the general uneducated populace is far worse in this regard. Higher education is simply the opportunity to cut the riffraff in an efficient way.