this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Depends what areas of education you mean. I think the most important areas people need to know more about in order to better the world as a whole are literacy, numeracy and world issues (war, current politics, climate change, etc).
Spending $100B to make university free would just accelerate a new problem that the world is facing: overeducation. Now it's harder to get a job without a college degree as a minimum, especially above minimum wage, even though the skills gained in the degree are not what is actually in demand or being used in whatever job someone ends up with.
Granted that's mainly a problem in the USA at the moment, and with $100B you could also fund a lot of R&D so people studying STEM end up in STEM jobs bettering the world.
It needs to be heavily targeted towards mandatory education, particularly K-12 or equivalents, and have a strong focus on critical thinking, scientific skepticism, technical literacy, entrepreneurialism, and the methods and models of social programming that are commonly used (how to identify, resist and avoid them).
This will help create generational change which is great for the future, but sadly does nothing to solve the pressing issues we face right now.
I think education on this level even for adults, especially in 'third world' countries, would help alleviate some issues we face today very quickly over the course of a few years.
Why entrepeneurialism?
Agreed. Education does not = academia. I’d argue that right now the incentives for academia for the sake of academia is far higher than for education and learning. There’s something systematic there. I can’t tell where $100B would be the most effective but getting 20 years olds MBAs ain’t it.