China is now a country where a high-school handyman has a master’s degree in physics; a cleaner is qualified in environmental planning; a delivery driver studied philosophy, and a PhD graduate from the prestigious Tsinghua University ends up applying to work as an auxiliary police officer.
These are real cases in a struggling economy - and it is not hard to find more like them.
I know nothing of the sort, and I honestly think it’s far less snobbish than the alternative.
I absolutely had nothing better to do than education, that much I give you. It’s a high bar, I was doing some really cool shit.
Thankfully, my government agreed with me on that one, and I’m more than happy to pay taxes for the rest of my life to make it keep being the case. And thankfully, my parents agreed as well. My dad was adamant I didn’t take a job on the side despite us not being particularly well off. Probably because he’s a left-leaning teacher himself and HE worked his ass off and paid all the taxes so we could all do that, not to have us drive living wages down by squatting at McDonalds, or whatever.
And sure, it was an investment in the way reading a book in my own time is an investment. It made me better at a thing and taught me things and gave me time to figure stuff out. It was certainly not an investment in my career. I haven’t submitted my degree with a job application once in decades of working for a living. Did alright anyway, wouldn’t have done as well without the things I lived and learned or the people I met and learned from.
Which is what education is for, in my book. If you’re looking at dollar input versus lifetime dollar output… well, you do need an education, so maybe you can get that while you’re making a fool of yourself getting that MBA or whatever.