If you want to make a contribution to the development of vaccines or remedies, or to medical care, then you simply need to study accordingly. I agree with you that it is an undesirable development that nowadays everybody wants to study, no matter what, or preferably something where you can get a bachelor's degree with little effort. On the other hand, there is an increasing lack of qualified, experienced professionals, such as those needed in nursing or in the construction industry. If I need someone to repair my heating system today, I have to wait a long time and pay a lot. And through my taxes I pay at the same time to the many unemployed historians and social scientists.
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I doubt very much that there’s causation between senior citizens getting degrees and a lack of specialized professionals. Things rarely work that way. I’d be glad to pay for unemployed historians and social scientists, they enrich our intelectual culture and help shape my country. I’d be even happier if they got jobs of course.
Go up to the comment of gbronner to which I responded. If people are bothered by the fact that retirees study and do their doctorates, they should ask themselves the questions I have asked. I think it's good if pensioners keep themselves busy in a meaningful way, as long as it doesn't put an additional burden on society. Imagine how much society benefits when pensioners use their time to study cell metabolism and use the vast amount of data available to discover connections and mechanisms that lead to new antibiotics or other useful drugs instead of being bored and spending the rest of their lives in front of the television. And unlike you, I don't think it makes any sense at all to let people study stuff that primarily costs society, both for the study and for the subsequent maintenance of these people. Enrichting the intelectual culture is good, but for this we do not need the legions of historians, publicists, media scientists or philosophers, or other fields of study whose sole purpose seems to be to create offspring of their own kind.
> whose sole purpose seems to be to create offspring of their own kind
That’s absolutely not their sole purpose.
The graduates of the above mentioned studies I know of work at the academy of their field, or in the administration and help expand the state administration and bureaucracy.
That sounds like a very small and likely very biased sample of people from those fields.
It seems to me that what you learned about these graduates says a lot about these graduates.
And someone must take care of state bureaucracy anyway.