I think the issue is US _culture_, not education (although the two are intertwined). We had too many easy years where you could take a Jack Kerouac road trip for 5 years to find yourself and then settle down to the equivalent of a cushy 6 figure job just for being a man with a pulse. Now if you do that, you will come back to find all the cushy jobs filled, and you are unqualified for anything except bottom of barrel service industry jobs.
Today there is a lot more prerequisite grind to become a doctor that parents don't feel good about forcing on their kids. Five decades of movies villifying parents for pushing their kids too hard will do that.
Meanwhile, parents in/from China and India and Nigeria and many other places are more than willing to force their kids to grind to move up the economic ladder.
At our current level of technological advancement, we should be able to get far more than a 5y Kerouac road trip before joining the grind. Where are all those supposed productivity gains going? Why are we becoming less free?
(This is sort of an aside. Yes, bring all the hardworking immigrants here, please. And maybe let them have those road trips, too.)
It's obvious to me the gains of our productivity is being siphoned up. The US economy is... very weird right now, and has been getting weird for a few decades. I wouldn't even consider the US a capitalist nation, what we have is something new.
Most companies don't do anything, most investors make money without putting in any labor, and money just... poof, appears. But not for us. Nothing really seems to make sense anymore.
Things that were trivial before, like having a receptionist to answer your phone, now seems economically impossible. And yet, our GDP continues to rise. We run companies with a tenth of the people we did before - everything is computerized, automated. But the wages are lower.
- stonks go up to prevent a pensioner revolt and to inflate egos of billionaires
We are kind of equivocating about "the grind" though. There is the grind of a student keeping their heads in books and activities while friends play video games or party or whatever. This grind has a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of obvious graduation dates and similar rites of passage.
Then there is the grind of working at McDonalds or Walmart because that is the only opportunity left to you, and that is a grind that might easily go on forever unless you win the hunger games and get into a management track rat race.
Getting into the medical school and staying there for so many years until you can support yourself means also a huge investment from the family. Now, what is the culture saying about this? Would you keep your kids on your paycheck until they're almost 30, or you throw them out to get a job as soon they're 16? And of course, can the kids already afford to be independent and support themselves when they're 16 (aah sweet liberty fuck those geezers)? These are I believe other major contributing factors in western societies.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but... yes? As a parent I absolutely am going to make sacrifices to help my kids get through college, and one is planning for med school. I feel like many immigrant parents have this mentality. It is the native born who do not. (Native born white guy here looking at all my family and acquaintances)
Today there is a lot more prerequisite grind to become a doctor that parents don't feel good about forcing on their kids. Five decades of movies villifying parents for pushing their kids too hard will do that.
Meanwhile, parents in/from China and India and Nigeria and many other places are more than willing to force their kids to grind to move up the economic ladder.