A local tech worker recently posed this exact question to the San Francisco community, and it struck a nerve. About a year out of grad school, they found themselves missing the intellectual variety that formal education offers — history, literature, physics, the stuff that makes you a more interesting person at dinner parties and, frankly, a better citizen.

It's a genuinely important question, and one that free markets answer better than most people realize.

The options in and around San Francisco are staggering. City College of San Francisco offers courses for next to nothing — we're talking single-digit dollar fees per unit for California residents. That's a taxpayer-subsidized resource that actually delivers value, which is more than we can say for a lot of city spending. Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT all offer free or low-cost courses through platforms like Coursera, edX, and OpenCourseWare. You can take a Yale philosophy course in your pajamas. The San Francisco Public Library — another institution that earns its keep — offers free access to language-learning platforms, digital archives, and lecture series.

Then there's the informal economy of learning: podcasts, reading groups, YouTube lectures from world-class professors, and SF's own ecosystem of meetups and public talks. The incremental cost of self-education in 2025 is approaching zero. The only scarce resource is your time and discipline.

Here's the liberty-minded take: nobody is going to structure this for you anymore, and that's a feature, not a bug. The freedom to design your own intellectual life — picking exactly what fascinates you, on your own schedule, without a bureaucracy dictating requirements — is one of the great underappreciated perks of adulthood.

The real challenge isn't access. It's commitment. Set a schedule, treat it like you'd treat a gym routine, and protect it from the gravitational pull of Netflix and doom-scrolling.

Your diploma said you were done. Your curiosity doesn't have to agree.