We would be better off if all but the top tier of private schools disappeared overnight, at least. Doing without the rest would pose more challenges.
Admittedly, it is difficult to have an overly positive opinion of an institution that has reduced over 40 million adults in this country to peonage.
Moreover, we have people with master's degrees who can barely write coherent paragraphs, let alone manage complex projects. We have people with bachelor's degrees who are functionally illiterate.
These are abysmal results for an education system in which most of us spend close to two decades, that spends one quarter of a million dollars on the typical student who makes it through college, and to which millions of teachers and students dedicate themselves every year. Human sacrifice, it seems, is far from a thing of the past.
I am just curious how bad this "functional illiteracy" is amongst those you mention at your workplace (not scare quotes, I have just heard multiple definitions ranging from inability to understand medicine instructions to difficulty reading pages of material). Would it be to the point that those people would be unable to understand a simple paragraph in a newspaper article? If so, I wouldn't doubt it, but yikes.
I don't think I'd go quite this far, but this is largely accurate.
There are a few big structural problems within education:
1. High levels of student debt and non-dischargeability of student loans. There's a lot of things to go around but a few big factors are:
-Room and board inflation - which is occurring just as rapidly as tuition inflation IIRC, largely due to expensive construction of new buildings and amenities to attract upper-class students to the college but also increases the cost of attendance for everyone.
-Tuition inflation: again, numerous factors are at play, such as declining state aid (for public schools) and perverse incentives through the student loan program, which gives easy immediate access to funds for students to borrow but has very harsh strings attached. A paper I stumbled across recently attributed nearly all of the 106% increase in tuition rates due to student loan program reforms.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w219672. Low levels of learning: I am fortunate in that I feel I have developed intellectually a fair amount over my time at college thus far, but it's not a universal experience. In fact, a large percentage of students don't have any demonstrable increase in critical thinking or analytical reasoning skills in college.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/19/experts_note_limits_of_report_that_says_college_students_aren_t_learning 3. Weak connection to labor market
For many majors, even if they are worthwhile, it is difficult to procure employment with them. There is also a fair level of detachment of much of academia from the demands of current employers: this is fine to an extent - after all, some of the goals of a university should be independent of immediate employment prospects - but especially for students in non-technical majors (engineering, accounting, nursing, etc.), it's incumbent for colleges both to ensure students have demonstrable skills in writing, analytical thinking, etc. and are guided in extracurricular activities to pursue to increase employment prospects, such as learning a programming language.
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