If all you want to do is learn things, in Australia, anyone can attend lectures. You cant go to tutorials, or get a degree, but you can enrich your soul as much as you like.
In Brasil too, on public institutions, as long as there’s vacancies not filled by enrolled students.
Its kinda the original point of universities, a place people go to share ideas and learn from one another. Somewhere along the way a lot of them turned into degree mills instead :(
My experience with uni was soul crushing.
Same. It was unpleasant. It was expensive. It was lonely. It wasn't well supported. Life only started looking up once university finished.
The problem is that no one is learning for the sake of learning when university costs more than a house deposit and then some. Opportunities are gated behind university degrees, so people have to do them. So the marker of success will continue to be how many people find high paying jobs.
Make education affordable. Make education accessible. Make wages reasonable to afford a basic standard of living at least.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For many policymakers (and not just in this government), the worth of a degree is measured primarily by metrics such as the proportion of students who fail to complete their course and the number who land high-skilled, well-paid jobs.
Ironically, though, the highest dropout rates at universities are in computer sciences, business and administrative studies, and engineering and technology.
Apprentices “are often treated as ‘workers rather than learners’”, forced into “low-skill, low-level positions while being paid far less than the national minimum wage”.
Instead, politicians choose to whip up a moral panic about poor-quality university courses while largely ignoring the lack of quality in many apprenticeships.
A “cynical interpretation” of the results, Moss concluded, is that universities “seeking to secure the highest recognition for teaching excellence should focus on recruiting as few students from disadvantaged backgrounds as possible”.
The notion of learning as being a good in itself, as a means of elevating the quality of our lives, is now derided as hopelessly naive, or at least as something that should be the preserve of elite students.
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