Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Fast forward 10 years from then. I am a 40 year old middle aged guy. Still working in tech albeit at a Senior level; with one school going kid and have a mortgage. I still visit Quora occasionally but am hard pressed to find any content that is interesting and appropriate for my age. It seems that they are still showing me questions which were mostly relevant to my younger self 10 years back and not now. There is practically no content or discussion in that forum that can attract and keep a 40 year old middle aged guy. Its just that I evolved but they didn't. Not to mention the fact that they also became more annoying with all these "promoted", "relevant" questions intermixed within the same page. I think their lack of ability to evolve over time absolutely finished the product. My two cents.

Sorry, but thats not how capitalism operates. Modern corporations are created for the benefit of share holders and they operate for only one reason and one reason only i.e. "to maximize" shareholder value [1].

Honestly, you seem to be living in some alternative "la la la la" land where you perceive reality in a very different way or at least want reality to be what you want it to be than what currently it is. I am not quite sure how to argue with people who hold beliefs similar to yours. Please note, we are not arguing here as to what is fair or not (read my response carefully) as per some definition of fairness.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

My objective here is to get to the truth - nothing more and nothing less. Unions can be "every bit harmful" since they are a power structure and power corrupts. Unrestrained, unfettered, corrupt unions can do more harm than good. They are not a cure all remedy for all problems a modern "evil" corporation might have [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBudiVNsW2E

Okay! in that case, I rest my case that unions can actually be very harmful due to it being a power structure and particularly if they are not subjected to any check and balances.

I mean the very simple question is: who pays? What protects the shareholders, management and the employees?

For degrees that are determined as less useful from a market perspective still one could make a case that there is a need to provide funding at graduate i.e. at the PhD level. I would give you that since most PhD students do go on to make significant contributions to scholarly literature therby vastly increasing human understanding and frontiers of knowledge.

But clearly this is not the case at undergraduate level. Sorry but the argument that tax payers should foot a bill just so that someone can satisfy his/her intellectual curiosity does not sound convincing at all.

Colleges and universities were never meant to be a way to riches and fortunes. If interested a degree is worth pursuing just for knowledge's sake regardless of the material benefits it may bestow upon the owner at some later point in their life. Hence I find the "college is so expensive" argument to be quite disingenious honestly. What exactly were you expecting may I ask?

Also, for people who want to learn something as a way to earn a living - may I humbly suggest vocational training instead?

In lots of places I have worked there is a particular term that is often used to precisely describe this situation, it is called POA aka "Promotion Oriented Architecture". In POA, you deliberately add a lot of accidental complexity to come up with a fiendishly complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. In short, the complexity stems from the solution space rather than the problem space.