Low quality course advertisements in 2024

The other day I came across this advertisement on social media:

Putting carpets in bathrooms is not only a terrible idea it is in contravention of a variety of building codes in many parts of the world. Trying to sell this as "practical" was so infuriating to me that it made me write this post.

Many people in the comments were trashing on this course and rightfully so. I find this advertisement noxious on many levels, firstly they clearly are teaching people absolute garbage. Secondly they are playing on people's ignorance to get them into courses. Many people have probably had the idea "why isn't there carpet in bathrooms?" and as it turns out there are very good reasons why this isn't done, but the people promoting this course are unethically using this thought as a hook. In areas with high moisture carpet becomes a huge problem with regards to mold and mildew. Mold exposure is a seriously big deal for your health so you want to avoid exposure and you should design buildings to avoid these problems.

Here's a picture of some carpet I had to take up because it had moisture damage:

This is just disgusting and I've seen worse than this too. Generally I'm just wanting to get this dumped as fast as possible so the thought of taking a photo generally doesn't cross my mind unless an insurance claim or something is involved. It wasn't entirely obvious just how bad the mold and mildew was until we got this up. In any case you'd never design something that would encourage a problem like this.

What happened next is informative, the "education" company deleted the comments made by knowledgeable builders and interior designers before reposting the exact same advertisement with comments disabled. I learned a few interesting things in the comment section about interior design. Unfortunately the company deleted all this. And I use the word "company" here very deliberately as extracting money is obviously the main imperative of anyone who is willing to teach clear garbage in a course while deleting educational comments. There's a pattern here that I think is important to observe: "educational" providers who delete comments are displaying a massive red flag that you shouldn't ignore. Anyone in the educational sector that's avoiding accountability is telling you that the quality of their content likely does not stand up to scrutiny. The educational provider with a few negative comments is likely a far better option than the one with comments disabled.

Generally speaking at the moment a huge percentage of courses are not worth doing in Australia. These courses come with a large number of very real costs, but even the "cheap" ones come with the massive opportunity cost in the form of your time. When choosing a course you aren't just paying the course fees you are investing a considerable amount of your time, in some cases multiple years of your life. In a society that is so used to exchanging money to cut down on time you'd think people might start to think about tradeoffs with time in education more critically. Some people think about spending money to save time but far fewer people think about how saving time can save them money. Due to extreme lifelong indoctrination that people are exposed to via the forced schooling system they attend when younger they don't tend to question the value proposition of taking courses until long after they have enrolled in them. Questioning if your time is worth being spent on a course is harder when your perspective has been subjected to the stockholm syndrome effect of being forced through over a decade of schooling earlier in your life. The idea that's been pushed on people is that education is always worthwhile regardless of the costs and that nobody should even engage in the thought processes that start to do an economic analysis of the benefits. Against this cultural backdrop it probably is no surprise that the costs of courses has exploded in recent years, if people aren't questioning the costs its easy to raise them and costs have been raised. But because of this same explosion in costs, combined with a collapse in educational standards, it's never been more important to do a cost benefit analysis before enrolling.