Stephen Monrad

We become adults at about age 18. We are fully grown and sexually mature. Our instincts tell us that it is time to leave home and start independent lives and perhaps families.

Unfortunately, most 18 year olds are only qualified to do low skill, low pay work. Several more years of school are needed to get the knowledge and credentials required for good jobs. This is a recent problem. It is only in the past century or so that education has become so important. While it isn’t hard to till a field, designing computer chips is tricky. More skills and training are needed to work with modern technology.

Getting the skills is definitely worth it – skilled workers are far more productive than unskilled ones. Acquiring the skills, however, demands patience. Independence as an adult needs to be put off for several years. In most cases, some support from parents is needed for people to get post-secondary education.

In today’s world, people become adults before they acquire the skills they need to look after themselves.

While this works out okay for many people, lots of people don’t get the skills they need to be productive. They end up working at low paying jobs and being only marginally productive for their whole work lives.

I believe that it would be much better to view post secondary education as work. People should be paid to study medicine and physics. It’s demanding work. In this post, I’m not going to concern myself with where the funding would come from. I only want to point out that adults should be paid to do things that prepare them for their careers. Not paying students to do advanced studies drags out childhood dependence. If parental support isn’t there, people don’t get the training they need.