It is expensive because it confers greatly enhanced earning potential. Students borrow against that future income. Sometimes from the state.

It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.

I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.

If it was that simple, the cost of education per student would be highest in places like Germany.

> Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State. reply

The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance.

You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all.

If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.