Before college was a means to get a job, it was status signalling for the upper class by showing they could spend 4 years not working and learning things with no economic value that few could afford. There was never a time when a large portion of society went to school past 18 for any reason other than economic or status gain, and why should they?
Because modern life is radically more complicated than humans can naturally deal with.
Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to understand Information security to avoid getting phished, didn't need to understand compounding interest for things like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to have some kind of mental model for the hordes of algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of taking all of our available attention (a resource that people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of that boredom was a serious concern) for the express purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc
Like, being productive in modern society is complicated. That's what education is for.
Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the or.
We've put into place a context for intellectual achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field?
Because a college degree isn't an intellectual achievement. It's 4 years of school when you've already done 13. I went to one of those schools where people go "oh, you went to $SCHOOL" when they find out, and I always want to roll my eyes because I didn't do shit to get that degree.
I think learning stuff and making art just for the hell of it is going to become a lot more accepted as society continues on and more and more peoples' jobs get automated away. Obviously that's a huge simplification of a much more complex situation, but in general I think the best future is one where people are free to pursue interests without regard for those interests ability to pay for their food and housing.
Decoupling working from living: means only intrinsically valuable things get worked on. No more working a 9-5 at a scam call center or figuring out how to make people click on ads. There is ONLY BENEFIT (to everyone) from giving labor such leverage.
Not every job needs to or should even exist: everyone having a job isn't utopia. Utopia is being free to choose what you work on. This directs market value for labor to go up. Work that needs to get done will be aligned with financial incentives (farmers, janitors, repair industries would soar to new heights).
UBI is a necessary and great idea: A bottom floor to capitalism means we all can stand up and lift this sinking ship.
