There was a time when the answer was obvious. Education was the golden ticket, the escalator that lifted the child of a farmer into the boardroom, the guarantee that a degree stitched on paper would unlock a life stitched with dignity.
But today, as millions of graduates parade their certificates like lottery tickets without numbers, the world is asking the uncomfortable question. Is education still worth it, or is it the biggest scam humanity has normalized?
The disillusionment is not without cause. In Nigeria, in India, in Brazil, in the forgotten towns of America, graduates drive taxis, man factory lines, or wait endlessly for jobs that never come. Parents bankrupt themselves for tuition fees, only to watch their children join the swelling ranks of the underemployed. Global student debt has ballooned past $1.7 trillion, shackling an entire generation. That’s not opportunity. That’s indentured servitude dressed in a cap and gown.
So yes, education feels like a scam. But that statement is both too true and too false. It is true because the promise sold “study hard and the world will reward you” has collapsed under the pressure of automation, inequality, and broken economies. It is false because the absence of education leaves people even more powerless, voiceless, and easily deceived. If education is a scam, ignorance is a death sentence.
The problem is not learning. The problem is the fossilized way we have chosen to deliver it. Our schools still teach 19th-century syllabi for 21st-century battles. We force children to memorize rivers in geography while they drown in oceans of misinformation online. We train them to pass exams but not to question power. We churn out degree holders, not problem solvers. In that sense, yes, education has been hijacked not by teachers, but by outdated systems, profiteering institutions, and governments that prefer obedient citizens to thinking rebels.
But here’s the paradox, the very cynics who shout “education is a scam” often use the tools education gave them, literacy, language, and persuasion to make that very argument. The real scam is not learning itself. The real scam is pretending that learning ends at graduation.
The world has shifted. Jobs evaporate. Industries reinvent themselves overnight. AI outpaces textbooks before they are even printed. Yet most universities still behave like factories, stamping certificates with expiry dates the moment the ink dries. That’s the betrayal.
If education is to be rescued, it must be rebuilt. It can no longer be a one-time inoculation against poverty; it must be a lifelong vaccine against irrelevance. It must collapse the wall between classroom and real life.
A child in Lagos should learn coding as naturally as she learns to write. A student in Delhi should graduate with both knowledge and networks that plug him into the economy. A farmer’s son in Kenya should be taught not just biology but the business of agriculture that keeps him independent in a world of corporations.
Most of all, education must recover its moral spine. It is not enough to produce clever graduates who know how to calculate interest rates but not how to question corruption, who can split atoms but cannot bridge divides. Knowledge without character is intelligence in the service of destruction. Intelligence without empathy is a weapon aimed at the future.
So, is education still a scam? Not quite. The dream of education is alive. The fraud lies in how governments, universities, and policymakers have refused to update the dream.
The irony is brutal, societies that underfund education end up paying a higher bill in poverty, crime, and stagnation. Ignorance is more expensive than tuition. The longer we pretend otherwise, the deeper the debt not just financial, but moral, civic, and generational.
The answer is not to abandon school. The answer is to demand an education that prepares us not just to find jobs but to create them, not just to fit into the world but to change it.
Because here’s the truth no one wants to admit: the future will not belong to those who memorized the most, but to those who can learn, unlearn, and relearn the fastest.
Education is not a scam. But leaving it broken, overpriced, outdated, and unchallenged? That is.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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