Why are we even letting LP frame this argument as if the fucking 'market' should drive what people do for an education.
Because people usually get a degree in order to pursue a particular career.
If too many people pursue say PhD in French Poetry or Medieval Art History not for personal edification but to pursue a career in those fields, you get an oversaturation of the market and people taking adjunct professor gigs for $20k per year like in this thread:
Professors in Poverty
Fucking hell, he's got a bad case of capitalism, and it's fully metastasized.
Would you rather have a bad case of stage IV socialism?
Do you think in actually existing countries you could get any degree you wanted for free? No, who was allowed to pursue higher education, in what field and at what institution was carefully regulated to conform to the current five year plan.
If we let the 'market' determine what people should do, all we get are fucking sportsball players and bad autotune.
Hardly. These professions get to make big bucks because most of the audience wants to see the games in the top league in a particular sport, which offer very limited employment. NBA has just over 500 players, NFL just under 1,700 and MLB is in the middle - just under 1000. That's a laughably small fraction of US workforce, and to suggest that "all we get are sportsball players" is laughable.
Yes, there are minor leagues, but they are not paid well. And things are even worse for individual sports. There are probably less than hundred active American professional tennis players, only 22 of them being top 100 ranked (
11 men, 11 women as of 2018).
Same goes for popular musicians. A few thousand can actually make a living making music at any given time, whether autotuned or not.
No. Just fucking no. We need art, as a civilization.
Ok, we do, to some extent. But do we need government funded/subsidized art? And who then decides what is art worth funding/subsidizing?
The art world is largely a scam these days anyway. A lot of tax dodging and money laundering.
And we do have those.
and teachers (there's one the market really fucked up)
The median salary for teachers in the US is ~$60k. That's not bad for a job with Summers off and is better than median income for minor sportsball leagues like MiLB or G-League. Median household income is ~$67k so a median teacher is just under that. Two median teachers have a household income of about 3rd quartile. Does not really correspond well to the memes about how teachers are the poors.
and nurses and all kinds of professions that the market drastically under values.
Nurses make ~$75k median. More for higher level like nurse practitioners.
Really? You think teachers and nurses were valued higher under actually existing socialism? I grew up in an actually existing socialist country and let me tell you, they were not.