1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes.
2) There are better options than college for many. One of my daughters did a six month digital marketing bootcamp. She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr.
3) College is way over priced. They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree.
4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free.
1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education?
2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made.
3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive. Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?
4. As you’ve already demonstrated college is hardly required let alone loans.
I’m surprised this is the top post.
Average College grads make more money over their lifetime, period.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
The impression I get from hanging out a bit in the welding subreddit is that a lot of people get into welding thinking it'll be a lucrative profession (because that's what people on the internet say about plumbers and welders and electricians and so forth), and what they eventually discover is that while it's possible to make a lot of money as a welder, that really only works if you own your own business. If you take a job working as someone else's employee, the pay usually isn't all that great.
That isn't to say that people shouldn't get into welding, it's just that they should have the right strategy and expectation going in.
With the forklift you will stay at 45k forever and probably make less every year whereas for the teacher this is a starting salary and will go up. Talk to real blue collar workers and from most you will hear a not very rosy picture. Pay stagnates, management treats them like crap, terrible working conditions, very hard on the body so getting older is difficult.
Unless you are a business owner or in a very good union blue collar jobs aren't much fun.
I'm surprised by the magnitude but I can see why this would be the case. Working teenagers probably correlate with having parents who value work. Plus it teaches some valuable skills early on. An entry level job can throw all sorts of uncomfortable challenges at you, which you are expected to handle in stride.
I'd say there's a societal benefit as well, due to the empathy it promotes. Most people work very different jobs as an adult than they would as a teenager. Having more perspective on what other workers experience makes one more kind and reasonable in general.
Just as with claims about college, there is a huge selection bias in this observation. (A substantially higher proportion of youngish Americans obtain a bachelors degree than have a job before age 18.)
Edit: Let’s be clear: there is obviously a huge selection bias when talking about college as well, which should not be ignored.
I agree there are better options than college for many. Thought if I were a betting man, on average, College is the better decision.
> One of my daughters did a six month digital marketing bootcamp. She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr.
I'm curious how old she was when she completed that bootcamp, and if she had a degree in another field, and/or experience. I just cant fathom a 20 year being a marketing director making $100,000.
In nearly 20 years professionally, I have worked with MANY people between the ages of 18-22 (many of which themselves attend or attended prestigious schools), and none showed the aptitude, skill and leadership required to be director at that time.
At what point in the past 50 years did we start expecting academic liberal arts institutions to start churning out people with vocational skills? These are entirely different things.
The fact that an average 1970's college graduate was highly employable has nothing to do with those colleges having good vocational training programs, and everything to do with selection bias of those who attended and the economics of the time.
If you need vocational skills, you should enroll in a vocational program.
I fail to see how this is a problem, and whether it should be fixed. The very idea that people that went through college deserve more is insulting for tradespeople as well as the source of bad incentives to go to college. If anything, the society would probably benefit from colleges focusing on transmitting and advancing knowledge, rather than being paid fast-lanes for people who only give a fuck about the payckeck.
This idea that some works deserve fair pay and some work deserve abuse (the worst being "burger flipper", "student job", etc.) really need to die. If you don't think it deserves fair pay and respect, you don't deserve the service.
This needs to be fixed for the school-only path to be viable.
Education degrees and Journalism degrees rank near the bottom of pay.
If you want a good starting salary, invest in a STEM major.
Above all, google "starting salaries for major XXXXX" before picking one. Sheesh!
> 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs
This is a problem that the colleges cannot fix. It's not the college systems fault teacher pay is being held back so much (unless by that you mean they should dramatically increase professors' salaries, so that the higher rates in academia trickle down.)
> 2) There are better options than college for many.
This is point 1 again. Digital Marketing is just a different skilled trade.
> 3) College is way over priced.
Isn't that because tuition has been a larger and larger portion of their income?
> They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree.
Sure, and? That's not relevant to the discussion, because they just isolated one variable. If both statements are true, you would expect a college educated person who had a job before 18 to make 89% more than someone who did neither.
> 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop.
I agree. But it's not the college system's fault that public support (financially) nosedived over the past couple of decades.
That...is one heck of a promotion. Good for her!
I'm not sure universities can fix this, or want to fix this.
Many of the people opting for university degrees aren't looking to perform work that needs to be done, but seeking a role that makes them feel powerful/smart/elegant/influential etc.
In a market-based economy that rewards meeting the needs/wants of others, I'm honestly surprised that many college grads are paid anything at all.
Is this a problem that needs fixing? We don't have enough plumbers & electricians (for example), many in those fields are retiring and until lately there haven't been enough people entering those trades to replace those retiring. Now we're probably going to start seeing people enter those trades at a higher rate than in the recent past. These are very good paying jobs and often it's hard to find a plumber or electrician when you need one.
The real issues are twofold: first, student loans are underregulated and very predatory in a way that car loans and mortgages are not; second, like you said in your third point, college is way overpriced, with the cost of it going up about an order of magnitude over the past few decades with no discernable increase in quality (see the excellent Consideration On Cost Disease for more[1]).
If education was 10x cheaper and student loan rates were 3-5% a year, you wouldn't need the public to fund education - and even if you wanted to, it'd be a far easier time selling that idea than trying to convince people to fund undergraduate degrees to the tune of $100k+ per student.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
I agree college is far too expensive and the rate of inflation of college tuition is rather absurd. The reasons for such, are best debated in another thread. However, I'm skeptical that eliminating student debt would ultimately result in significantly better financial outcomes for young people. Instead, most of the "savings" would be swallowed up by higher real estate and rent costs. The pandemic should serve as prima facie evidence -- give a huge swath of the population more cash, real estate will eat much/most/all of it. Let's say that instead of student debt, the typical 22-32 year-old professional has approximately $500 more spending power. All that means is that they will compete with each other to purchase housing, pushing rents and housing costs up -- not just for themselves but also for everyone else.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reduce student debt (not via forgiveness, but by reducing education costs to begin with) -- but doing so is not a panacea.
A bachelors degree is not a license to practice or guarantee of employment. That is not the point of education.
Having a job before 18 and getting a bachelors degree are not mutually exclusive, in fact, recent data suggests that about half of all people attending undergraduate school are employed. I personally was employed by 16 and went to college at 18, keeping a job for the entire time to offset some of the costs.
I do agree that student loans are a heinous tool though, even moderate loans accrue huge interest during a formative time in your career and prevent you from saving for retirement during the vital years when your investments have the most time to mature.
For decades clueless counselors pushed kids that were not successful academically or with behavioral issues into "the trades"... Only for the kids to realize they do need good reading and academic abilities to be able to succeed as a skilled tradesman. And that it takes disciplines to work in those fields.
We keep hearing about the successful tradespeople (notice how they are all their own bosses and own their shops) who made it but not the auto-repair schools’ dropouts.
Nobody has forced anyone to take a student loan. In fact, many young adults would probably learn a lot about life, financial management, and restraint if they saved for college and waited till they could afford it instead of going straight to college and going into huge amounts of debt. Generally society doesn’t condone going into debt carelessly in other situations so I don’t understand how we give (or want to give) students a free pass for racking up thousands (or hundreds of thousands) in loans.
My startup is trying to help this in the flooring industry. At https://gocarrera.com we have made a platform for contractors to connect to companies and vice versa. We will roll out a feature shortly for people unfamiliar with the industry to be and to find add join other contractor teams to help them get started in the industry. It's really exciting and pretty shocking how complex the industry is.
Hate to say it, but sounds like a diversity promotion to me.
To me this is just a sign that the market is working correctly. The world needs more forklift drivers, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics than it needs teachers. The idea that teachers deserve to be paid more is elitist, IMHO. The problem is that our culture incorrectly assumes college degrees are the only way to “learn” productive and valuable skills.
All that to say, if the economics of college were better, even I (mid-career) would consider going back for a couple of degrees to continue expanding my community.
That's too short sighted. What's the lifetime earning potential of a forklift driver vs a teacher?
Median starting pay for a 4 year degree is over $54k at the moment.
That's a massive difference.
Yes, the whole system is utterly convoluted, twisted, and perverted into dysfunction; but I also find it astonishing that you claim it's some kind of debt-bondage, right after clearly making the point that you can just go into a skilled trade or to a marketing bootcamp and that just alone the drive and work ethic of someone who has a job before 18 will set you up for success.
The real issue is that the upper class has colluded to corrupt the whole education system, largely for self-enrichment, which has also have an exorbitant impact on America's competitiveness by inefficient allocation of human resources into ever increasingly useless degrees. It is not a coincidence that all these changes have correlated the increase in communistic/socialistic type policies and mentalities.
Maybe had a job before age 18 implies later went to college for instance.
E.g. if you take a math degree that teach "2+2 != 5" this degree is likely to reduce mental acuity. You'll be a great activist, but not a great mathematician or teacher.
1. Create needless procedural requirements, each alluding to serve some sort of qualitative intent
2. Hire people to service these requirements
3. Profit?
Instead, my double major in mechanical engineering/applied economics was heavily loaded with highly inefficient, archaic classes in subjects I cared about combined with a heavy dose of mandatory humanities type courses that were essentially ultra-leftwing indoctrination courses. For example, my Latin American history course was a non-stop "Latin America is a crappy place because it doesn't have enough Marxism" course.
I was assigned various books, and as long as I wrote about the books with identical conclusions to the professor, I got an A, no matter how horribly written. If I wrote eloquently about why I thought the book about Gaitan's socialist movement in Columbia wasn't as angelic as depicted in the book, I got a D. Another book that was assigned reading was "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" which is essentially a handbook telling you how to get otherwise happy people to realize they are oppressed and embrace Marxism.
This was the early 2000s, and the predictions about Columbia, for example, couldn't have been more wrong. It's a vastly improved place compared to then, despite the depiction in the class of a sinister, evil, predatory capitalist society. No matter what South American country you discussed, if it was communist/socialist, it was a paradise. If it wasn't, it was a dictatorship. The teacher wouldn't stop talking about how amazing Venezuela was, and how Hugo Chavez was "misunderstood."
Another class I took was called "Economics of Poverty". The professor is a person I can't forget, because long before I had ever heard of Elizabeth Warren, she was a fair skinned, blue-eyed white woman who claimed to be half Native American. I never believed that for a second, and it was obvious she made this claim to advance her career. My favorite moment with her was when she told the entire class that "most of you will graduate from this school and be unable to find meaningful employment. Our economic system doesn't value what you've learned, and you need to fix that." It was a soul-crushing, disempowering experience and I'm furious about how much I bought into her and her colleague's bullshit back then. Pessimistic losers who've never left their bubble ruining young minds as they themselves live off of the oppressive debt the students are taking on.
I don't have a problem with nutbag activists, but I deeply resent the Federal government subsidizing them and their foolish causes, on the backs of 17 year olds signing away their lives for debt.
But that's a starting wage in tech in Seattle or the Bay area for an engineer that's in demand and it only goes up from there. Those engineers that are in demand all have undergraduate degrees, it's a huge virtue signal for hiring for now. A new college graduate with one year of industry experience got poached for $400k by a competitor. And that doesn't begin to cover what AI superstars make straight out of school.
Ironically as someone in the later phases of my tech career, I am increasingly interested in trade skills over tech skills. And doubly ironically there's a lot of intellectual overlap.
The alternative, IMO, is to make state run schools tuition free, but there's no guarantee you'll get in. Use some relatively objective metrics like the SAT and relative standing in high school class to determine eligibility. Then get rid of federal lending altogether. Apparently this is more similar to some of the European models. Under this model, any highly gifted but poor person worried about debt can get a higher education. Granted, the gifted person is also generally okay in the current model, because they probably end up making enough to handle their debt. It's the less gifted person who still wants and benefits from a higher education, but can't get into the free state school, who benefits in this model, because the removal of unqualified lending will bring down prices of less competitive colleges.
But in the end, college as we know it, as great of an experience as it is for many of us, is likely becoming obsolete (in its current form, that is) with the rise of the internet and the ability to learn just about anything in your garage with an internet connection and a computer.
Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy.
If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.
Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less than $50k/yr so try going to Cal and/or your best local public school and supplement with self teaching (e.g. via public/free lectures from MIT)? The self directed learning/motivation is the hard part for many people of that age, but few have said living frugally should or would be easy.
Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
I have a senior in high school right now and although I think you're right - he's concerned about a potential quarter-million dollar tuition bill before this whole thing is over - he's also concerned about the whole selectivity of it all. From the outside looking in, you never know what's important and what's not. He has this feeling (and I'm not sure I can dispute it) that the only degrees that matter are degrees from hyper-selective ivy league schools and if the only school he can get into is Texas Tech, he might as well just give up and go into a trade. I remind him that I went to a no-name school and I'm doing fine but he says "things are different than when you were young", and I'm not 100% sure he's wrong.
I did this and through I resented it at the time, I existed college with around $30k in student debt versus my friends that all has something in range of ($40k to $80k). IMO 30k in student debt is very manageable, currently have the thing paid down to like $12k and I like knowing I can reach into savings at any time and wipe out this debt if need be.
https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...
Any loan that is charging 6.28% interest and also cant be discharged by bankruptcy is just usury with current interest rates.
What's predatory about public loans. They all qualify for income based repayment, which means you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income (any income over 1.5x the federal poverty level). If you make below that amount, you'll never be required to pay back anything. And they are cancelled after 20 years.
Theoretically you'd owe tax on cancelled debt, but only up to the point of solvency. And a borrower who hasn't made enough income to pay back a student loan after 20 years probably isn't solvent, so won't pay anything. This also assumes that as more and more people reach this point, there isn't demand for congress to change the tax code.
Public loans make up about 92% of all student loan debt as well, so the vast majority of loans are going to qualify.
I also was very concerned about cost when going college, so I went with the cheapest route possible and also worked a job during college. I went to community college for 2 years while living at my parent's house, which was very cheap, it cost about $1000 per year for that. Then I transferred to a cheaper in-state school, in my case it was one in the California State University system (CSU) which is way cheaper though not quite as well known as the UC system (UC Berkeley is part of that system), which cost me about 10k per year for the final 2 years.
In all I was able to get through college with no debt and a degree in Computer Science for a total cost of 22k. I think there is a mindset that students should always attend the best possible school that they are admitted to, but this seems pretty dumb to me as they are usually expensive for big brand names and in the end you receive the same degree and learn the same things.
What I did also happened in California, I think some states have even cheaper paths through college if you go with the community college + in-state university route.
I can do the first two years of undergrad, through a community colleges while still working, and grad school can be figure out later if I decide on it, but I’m still concerned about how much I need to save for those last two years of undergrad.
Tuition is one thing, while generally expensive, I’m in a state that’s not too bad if you can get in-state tuition. It’s still probably expensive, but nothing unmanageable (doesn’t seem much worse than financing a new car). The main concern is living expenses.
The financial aid system is a bureaucratic joke as far as I’m aware, and “estimated family contribution” seems like a delusion in the case of most people. I half-joked with some friends about living in a car for the last couple years, and one thought I was crazy, responding with an anecdote about how “you don’t have to do that, I worked 3 jobs to pay for my education” which to me almost seems more miserable at this point.
Barely anyone pays full tuition.
Look up the statistics for any of the big colleges that share numbers. It’s usually less than 10% of students paying full tuition. Significant numbers of students pay under $10K and many pay basically nothing at all.
It’s still too expensive, but the myth that everybody is paying $50K/year at these colleges needs to die. It ends up convincing a lot of people who shouldn’t be paying that much that everyone else is doing it and therefore they should too.
Enrollment was at record numbers immediately preceding the pandemic, and this was a trend that held for several years prior as well. Lots of colleges had been expanding their campuses like crazy in the Before Times.
I don't think the pandemic will result in a long-term shift away from this trend. By-and-large, college education remains is a worthwhile expenditure, despite the costs. You even agree, hence why you have three kids in college!
I can appreciate not going to college right now. Classes have been randomly cancelled, there have been lockdowns/classes going remote, professors aren't grading/lecturing at the levels they should be, students are doing the work, etc, etc. But once society reaches some level of normalcy again, I believe enrollment numbers will explode back to record levels.
Plus, cost-conscious students have more options than ever. A lot of community colleges are starting to offer 4 year degrees.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of students don't pay the sticker price because financial aid is provided early and often (beyond just loans). Very few students are actually paying $50k.* [0]
The average net price at a public college last year is $19,230 and the average net price at a private college is $33,720. Note that this doesn't just include tuition, but also room and board. So if you're going to public college you're probably paying $20k to eat, sleep, and learn. Plus you generally get some kind of health insurance too.
These averages can be significantly lower still for in-state public colleges and community colleges.
No doubt the massive inflation in college prices is driven by the government loans, and the federal government's policy around them should be modified at best. But we should speak in reality instead of the hyperbolic articles that often just look at tuition which is what most people are familiar with. Colleges below the top tier compete on their "discount rate" which is what percentage of the sticker price does the average student actually pay because almost no students pay the sticker price.
* "The average grant aid awarded per student was $8,100 at public colleges and $23,080 at private schools."
0: https://www.collegedata.com/resources/pay-your-way/whats-the...
It was about 15 years ago, I was 19. At the time, I was attending community college because I had no idea what I wanted to major in, or what I wanted to do with my life as far as careers go, but I had so much societal pressure telling me that I had to go to college in order to be successful. I'd tried steering myself towards a few subjects that were hobbies/passions of mine, but every time I dipped my toes into doing something with them professionally, I quickly became concerned about money/profit/work/bosses bastardizing my love for them and opted to keep them as hobbies/passions. 15 years later, I am still enamored by some of those same hobbies and am happy I kept them as such.
While the "goal" was to transfer to a university from the community college, I consistently found myself thinking, "I'm seeing a ton of my friends, and people who graduated HS a few years before me, taking out these massive loans. Why am I going to go into debt if I don't even know what I want to do?". It just made no sense to me, so I stopped. I've been incredibly lucky that I found a career path in an area that I'm good at, and have risen to a level in my career that I'm happy with, but I absolutely did have to work really hard to get here.
All that is to say, not only do I think we put far too much pressure on people to know what they want to do when they're still too young to truly have that figured out, but I also completely agree with you that cost is the primary concern here. If I didn't have to go into so much debt in order to have continued my college education, I have a feeling I would've opted to keep at it and figure out what I wanted to do along the way.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-feeding-college-bureaucrat...
When I hire now, I always look for kids who are willing to teach themselves and learn from all of the good sources on the Internet. Places like Coursera, Udemy or even YouTube. They're reasonably priced.
The best lessons I learned in college were off campus and developing my social skills (which is important).
We can't just look at tuition, but housing costs. The cost of housing sometimes rivals tuition. A fun fact is they make freshmen have to buy $2200 meal plans for their first year. They also prevent freshmen from better housing where they can cook for themselves and save money through food stamps.
Ontop of this part of those grants are work study, you have to work to receive that money. This is again even if you're dirt poor with nothing. You will have to take a second job if you need to buy personal items like deodorant.
The vast majority of students don't fit into this, they come from middle class parents and have to take out private loans. Students have to pay on private loans, so, again, more and more work. I know students working 30 hours a week just to meet living costs and pay what they owe to the University so they are not barred from signing up for classes. These students are not learning what they should be, even though they are very bright hard workers it's wasted because we let universities charge these ridiculous amounts.
It's not as if the unis are using it responsibly, either. They're not funding extracurriculars or programs students can learn more by being involved in. I recall one of our programs having to be funded by professors themselves to go anywhere. There are many different administrative workers that simply don't need to exist. The system has become lazy and inefficient. I recall in HS teachers spent hours grading. In uni - it's largely automatic. Yet we continue to have multiple teachers per subject and give professors just 1 or 2 classes.
If we defund universities they will shape up quickly. Defund, regulate, start firing people.
I understand that commuting to schools is not available to everyone but State schools are affordable. Entertaining the idea to go away for school either leads to higher costs or more debt. A 4 year degree from UT Dallas landed my oldest a 110k + first job in DFW. His entire degree cost approx 45-50k and that included gas, books, etc.
But central bank and government policies starting in the 70's gutted US manufacturing and took away most of the non-information worker jobs - so there was little else for the middle class to go for a career except first to college.
Hence today.
However, today it's easier than ever to live off the nanny state WITHOUT a career.
What should the role of college be today?
America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there.
Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals.
I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?
the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt
kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting
You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success.
The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem.
Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.
I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay.
You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.
I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc.
We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.
Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.
To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.
We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling.
How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles.
The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore
Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states.
My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)
There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
America just wants new grads to be indebted to motivate them to get to work.
Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life!
Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
We've gotten to the point where it would actually be cheaper for students to hire their own adjunct to each them 1:1, than to go to some universities.
Updating with numbers:
- USC tuition is >$60k/yr
- Adjunct professors in CA apparently earn $34-$43k/yr
https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/recruiting/adjunct-pr...
The reality is many universities have gotten out of the game of offering quality education. They still offer education, but they are largely indifferent to the quality of the education, so adjuncts will do just as well as any professor.
Instead, universities have spent enormous money and effort to protect and emphasize the college/university "experience." Thus you get an enormous amount of handholding and bureaucratization in higher-ed because they're functioning like giant weird resorts with health services, legal services, financial services, extra curricular services, and a whole lot of other crap with education as only the implied "reason" the students are there.
> But no school is judged on their regulatory compliance.
To a certain degree this is untrue. Student complaints and/or payee (parent) complaints for things like Title IX violations, as one example, mean a potential loss in federal/state funding and negative press. So institutions seek to bureaucratize the whole process from the tip of the root to the highest leaf. Higher-ed in the US has become a kind of ride into adulthood.
In regards to admin costs, just look at UC Berkeley, they now have a $25 million dollar diversity department that hires nearly a hundred staff, all making over $50k and getting access to the pension system. Lots of people will say departments like this are a good thing, but there’s no question these departments cost a lot of money and inflate administrative costs. Berkeley has 1 staff member for every 2 students at this point.
Look at this: “ Establishment of a Supplier Diversity Program at an institution is required when an organization is receiving federal funding for contracts or subcontracts as dictated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARS). The delegation of authority to manage the program is issued through the Office of the President (UCOP) policy.” Talk about regulation causing bloat, to take federal contracts you need to establish an office that tracks and reports the diversity of your contractors. No wonder costs have skyrocketed.
All uni’s I know of in the U.K. have hired hordes of admin staff. I think this is largely due to centralisation, eg rather than have an exam admin in each department, you have a team in a central building. This sounds like it will be more efficient, deduplicate effort etc, and also has the added imagined benefit of presenting all the courses in a similar way, so you can have a “uniform” and “unified” student experience.
But this is a fantasy.
The reality is that different departments and different courses need to be run according to their specific needs. So the central administration then either fails to address this or hires more people to compensate. And once you remove people from their actual job (ie take them out of the department and change the job from “helping lecturer X get this exam done” to “execute processes A B C” then the potential for bloat and empire building skyrockets. You end up with all sorts of strange initiatives, buildings, and job positions, that seem far removed from simply administering teaching and research.
At the same time the U.K. gov slashed funding, moved to a reliance on tuition fees, and pushed universities to run like businesses. Their ostensible purpose and the incentives they face are now dramatically misaligned, so it’s no surprise that the outcomes we see make no apparent sense. It’s far more important to bring in grant funding than provide good education, for example, when you know students will keep paying regardless.
Any industry that sees nothing but expansion for decades, has a rough time when it stops. I think higher ed is in for a rough time.
And I also agree: how will these institutions scale back? What if tuition was cut significantly? What programs are on the chopping block?
It will be interesting to see a follow-up analysis that parses out enrollment behavior by subgroup (e.g., by SAT/ACT score) as it will be easier to understand who is choosing not to enroll in college.
Another follow-up could be to see which institutions are losing students. It is known that college enrollment is counter-cyclical to the economy and that enrollment declines at community colleges and open access universities when people can get a job right out of high school.
I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus.
Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids to stay home the first couple years and hit the local community college for the first half of their degree, just because it's dramatically cheaper than what it'll cost to send them to live at a university.
I thought college was expensive when I was going in the 90s. Now it's just ridiculous.
For everyone else, all college does is shows people that you are diligent: you read the books, wrote the essays, passed the quizzes.
Now, the thing is most jobs are not directly related to any particular degree. For example if you become an option trader like I did, nothing on my Engineering/Econ/Mgt was relevant. Even the finance parts of the management course were not relevant. You learn on the job. Think about it, you are at work 50-70 hours a week the whole year vs splitting your time at uni over a much shorter calendar. At work you sit next to an expert, at school you sit next to novices.
So the whole idea that college qualifies you to do something is bogus. It's mainly a signal that you're teachable, and a weak signal that you're interested in some particular broad area.
I would guess that the great majority of jobs that people with degrees take could have been done by the same people without their degree. You'll never get people to admit that if you aren't friends with them, but that is generally what people think as well.
Are there other benefits to college? Certainly. You get to socialize, mature a bit away from home, and for most people it's the last time they are exposed to the great ideas that mankind has found over the centuries. Those things can all be done separately without paying for it, but currently the system is broken and everyone uses degrees as a social status marker, which is self-reinforcing: you still need a degree because if you don't have one you can't get those jobs that you don't need a degree to perform.
Students don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for remote learning. They could watch Khan Academy videos instead for free, and they’d be better quality.
I found people who did self directed online learning combined with having some projects to show in the resume were the best and had real world experience rather than having memorized a hundred java design patterns from the 90s.
I got my B.A. in 1968; I owed $800 balance on my student loan ($6,400 today).
My plumber just charged me $430 to install a sink, about an hour and a half's work. That doesn't include the cost of the sink. Are Gender Studies majors making this kind of money?
now many are massively bloated organizations with declining utility and the need to maintain their perpetual growth - who wants to cut costs? the downward spiral is only going to accelerate, IMO. and that doesn't even account for declining birth rates. my feeling is the next 20 years will see the higher ed industry contract rather quickly and the universities that remain will deliver either on quality (increasingly difficult to hold an advantage) or accessibility (inexpensive, contemporary workforce training since employers no longer do that).
However, I wanted to take a step back and offer a different perspective. College does more than teach one a trade. It should, ideally, help the student become a better citizen of their own culture, of the world, and of their community. College taught me deeper empathy, and different kinds of empathy, it taught me more about literature, history, cultures, anthropology. There is so much today that could be improved if, for example, philosophy was a core requirement of every CS curriculum.
Outside of coursework, It taught me how to make friends, and how when I did bad things, I would lose friends. In a way, it is a continuation of high school except with the training wheels off, with all the consequences of adulthood to be tasted for the very first time.
I know it is a privilege to say this, and it is why I am such a huge proponent of free education, but to miss college is to miss more than some academic study in a field. It is to miss a whole chapter of life. To go from high school to labor, without that sweet blissful blend of freedom, stress, and discovery feels like a life not fully lived.
I would love for everyone to experience this, so from this personal perspective, I find that this framing (of money), on the whole, a rather negative thing.
Borrowing to pay tuition to take general ED classes is dumb, and yet, this is the path that is pushed on our best and brightest.
At the least, kids should gen ed in Community College. At the best, we should reform or horrible curriculum.
This isn't likely to hit community colleges, which the article touches on. Just trying to point out that digging deeper might show some interesting details.
The elephant in the room is that those foreign students are also the ones paying sticker price and subsidizing college for the other students, even at public schools.
* Some abandoned their international studies plan and attended local colleges instead.
* Some took a gap year to wait until 2021.
* A minority pushed on and took classes online until they're able to come to the US.
First birth rates are generally down. Not only in America,but worldwide.
>Wages at the bottom of the economy have increased dramatically, making minimum-wage jobs especially appealing to young people as an alternative to college.
This isn't an ether or situation. I worked full time while going to school full time. In fact this was my entire senior year of college.
I actually got to 6 figures without a degree, but the entire point of college for me was getting away from my horrible family. It's still a good way to get distance.
This is great news overall. Tuition will have to drop and schools will offer more flexibility to working students.
In my home state of California the UCs are hostile to anyone with a 9-5, I hope this changes.
2. Interest is charged, which is abhorrent at any rate. Especially the 8%.
3. PPP "loans" to the tune of almost 1t$.. which were forgiven. Just run a few sham job ads for software engineers at 10$/hr and NobOdy wAnTS tO wOrk!
4. University doesn't really provide job skills. They allude to, but then say they dont.
5. Jobs say they need a degree, but that's primarily due to https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/griggs-v-duke-power-co/ and easier to exclude black people with a 'degree'.
6. Most programs do NOT need expensive schools, labs, etc. Non-lab based classes can easily get by online.
7. School costs are stupid, because "Its what the market will bear"
8. Even public higher ed schools are stupid priced, because the public aspect has been surely ripped away from them.
9. Even if you DO go, you're guaranteed only one thing: undismissable debt. I failed out due to medical reasons. I have the debt, and no degree to show for it.
As a millenial, higher ed is a bad bargain. And if you're younger, DO NOT LET HIGH SCHOOL threaten you with "if you dont go to school you will work as a grocery bagger for the rest of your life". Teach yourself IT. Get into an area, double down, learn it inside and out. Find a few hot tech areas. Learn them well. And off you go.
I have never considered a candidate’s college or if they even attended one. The only thing I evaluated is what they accomplished in the last 1-2 years. That meant hiring some brilliant engineers straight out of high school.
Most of these candidates were early stage hires for dozens of companies that went on to become billion dollar public companies or get acquired for 8-10 figures.
As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission.
Almost your entire career value is dependent on how well you can self-learn and self-motivate. The one important piece that school might teach or give you exposure to is how to collaborate effectively with others.
This right here.
The strongest argument against the status quo is that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
In aggregate college graduates could achieve equal or greater levels of learning, relative to their chosen profession, and cost, with education regimes other than the typical four year state college experience.
Ideally: 1. Attend an in-state university. 2. Look at your school's graduation report, which surveys students by major on their starting salary 3. Choose a program with a high starting salary 4. Take all general education classes online at a community college, starting the summer after high school graduation
This is the most probable way to achieve a high roi on college, for an average american.
Edit: clarified that private secondary school = private high school. Of course federal student loans are available for accredited private colleges/universities.
Not sure the reliability of this source but the trend is there across sources: [0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school
I guess they've since changed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Direct_Student_Loan_Pr...
They are very much for private schools. There's no real limit on them. They tend to cover the difference between what a family can pay and what the tuition is. They're generally low interest and you don't need to start paying them back until you're done with school.
Since the loans always cover the difference the impact of tuition costs going up isn't immediately felt
Worse, many get saddled with debt and don't finish for various reasons.
Meanwhile tuition and books keep skyrocketing as schools divert more of their attention away from academics and toward more profitable uses of institutional time and capital.
But in a bit of good news, more jobs are ditching the degree requirement as workers as more scarce. I am glad the pandemic has opened the eyes of employers to realize that a degree is not the indicator it once was.
Opinion: the self-taught are just as capable in the workforce and college degree requirements are gatekeeping.
Somehow, society wrongly started associating universities for corporate job preparation.
I think people are starting to realize that if you want to get prepared for work, you should go to a trade training (like bootcamps). If you are priviledged enough to pursue your interests, then universities are a great place to be.
During a parent/student College night, the perky 20-something group of presenters did a GREAT job of showing the schools, the perks, the ways to knock a little off the top (every student gets a scholarship! every student gets in-state tuition!)
They didn't count on me being good at math, and my reluctance to add nearly $600k in family debt over 4 years...that's double my mortgage, and I have 30 years to pay that off.
I decided as the patriarch that our family didn't need to prop up a broken system. I'm hopeful that I'm not scuttling my children's chances by doing so.
So I'm footing half the bill, and the boys are acquiring $20k or so a piece in student loans. I'm hoping that's enough for them to get their first job, because in my experience, that's the last time the sheepskin had any impact on my career.
I've heard this from a lot of kids going through this and I would not be surprised if that's the main driver versus this article's main point of short term work $ versus long term career $.
One of the interviewed kids said "he was tired of remote learning."
I can't find any surveys just googling around if anyone has a source?
for me, education alone would not be worth private school $, or even University of CO money (not science or maths). I barely learned anything from my major subject classes.
I learned a ton from living on campus, doing my sport, student government, being an RA, interning and then working on political campaigns. probably some HN bias I think most here are probably more self starter, more intelligent.
Plus college is about learning about yourself. Hard to become an independent adult when you're living in your parents house doing Zoom all day.
If we can align the incentives of colleges and students to find jobs, it will also be a win for the economy. Let students bargain with their future earning potential, if they don’t make anything, the school doesn’t make anything.
It's win-win-win, taxpayers get free access to universities for themselves and their children, students avoid debt or garnished wages in the future, and universities get government support and can shut down complicated administrative overhead for helping students navigate financing.
Now I know your thinking - does it scale? Yes! We have data from secondary and primary schools with the same cohort of students, who attend school for no cost. Attendance and graduation of these schools is closely correlated with life outcomes and success! We could apply this existing financing model to universities and solve the problem of tuition fees with by reusing the ideas from other tuition-free primary and secondary schools.
Prob a bit long for an elevator pitch, but hey.
If his major/career had the choice of degree vs work, the latter would be a really good choice right now.
The current sales pitch of college is "give us tens of thousands of dollars so you can watch some online classes with information you could find freely on the internet, we'll occasionally get you to write essays about how you were born inherently toxic as a person, and then at the end we give you a piece of paper that won't get you a job." No shit, attendance is going down.
Unless you have a very specific plan for a career you want to get into, and you know it's a job that would actually be worth the money spent (like a computer science degree so you can get into a software career), it's just such an obviously horrible deal.
Brian can't be bothered to enroll into college because he's tired of remote learning.
Yes, remote learning sucks. Doesn't mean you should stop. I'm bothered by this optionality. Later in life you're going to do a lot of things that suck, but have to do anyway. Further, at such young age, I would expect some hawkish parent to "help out" with the choice, but I guess I'm old fashioned.
Fine, though. Delaying enrollment whilst earning some cash in the meanwhile is not the end of the world. And so Brian starts work at Jimmy's sandwiches.
Then comes his mastermind move: he starts work at an Amazon warehouse for slightly more pay, yet needs to buy a car to get there. For which he takes a loan.
I imagine many Americans don't even blink at this, but it's absolutely moronic. The very point of the break from school was to earn cash. Instead of saving it up, he's now in debt for the car, works a shit job, and comes short both for his "needs" and for college.
Brian seems to have some self awareness at this point:
"It's so hard," he says. "I'm just like, 'Wow, if I go to school, I'm going to take time off and I'm not going to have any money for things I need.'"
Yeah, Brian, Wow indeed. Typical for American consumer culture: spending above your means from the very start.
What we need is a better life for the working class, not more college. Start by getting serious about wage and hour laws, and start throwing employers in jail.
It is criminal what they have done to people. Absolutely criminal.
My biggest gripe is the astronomical cost and debt burden that has vastly outpaced inflation. The university system in the U.S. has been taken hostage by greedy interests that push all kinds of bullshit costs on to students and have lost sight of exactly why the university exists in the first place - to educate. Not to house, not to entertain, not to keep fit, but to educate those that want to learn. If universities would stop with the non-sense "campus life" and focus more on a their core mission (like universities in Germany, for example) they might not have ended up in this predictable mess.
This level of enrollment decline only means one thing for universities: Layoffs and shrinking budgets. You can't squeeze any more blood out of these students.
There are plenty of adjunct professors who don't earn much. Why don't they join forces and create their own university?
If they focus on education and limit spending on administration and sports, they could offer high quality, affordable education.
1. There actually aren't many low-paid adjuncts in hot fields. The CS and Eng departments subsidize the Math department, and STEM+finance+premed+nursing subsidizes all of the humanities. A philosophy adjunct is probably doing way better ad juncting than they would off on their own. And the instructional staff in the in-demand fields are generally well-paid.
2. The low paid (and usually not that low paid) adjuncts within in-demand departments are generally there as a retirement gig... if they wanted a stressful empire building type of job, they'd go into industry.
3. Runway. Adjuncts who aren't semi-retired have no access to capital and here's a really long lead time until an institution is regionally accredited. You can't take a dime of federal grant money, GI bill money, private scholarship money, student loan money, etc. until you're accredited.
College in America is an example of a market failure induced by government intervention.
Federal loan guarantees and special rules around student loans (critically, they are not absolvable via bankruptcy) have caused a distorted market, whereby the colleges are incentivized to compete with each other for these guaranteed loans. Remember the student is a child, likely 17. They almost certainly have never supported themselves financially, and almost certainly have no conception of what a $200,000 loan will look like 10 years down the road. So you have colleges who are _guaranteed_ to get $200,000 from these poor students. You'd have to be some crazy altruist not to exploit that!
However, imagine a world in which no such federally-guaranteed loans existed (and critically where absolvable by bankruptcy). In this case, no rational bank would loan a student 200k. The financials simply aren't there. Now students have to look around for funding options in the private market, which is only going to cut loans it believes will turn a profit: that is, loans to students who they believe will be able to pay them back.
We have built a flawed economic model here: it is guaranteed to fail. The only solution is to overhaul this market either via novel market design or via nationalization.
The choices of individual schools is mostly irrelevant: as market players, all they can do is play the game. The game is bad, and so the schools' decisions have bad outcomes.
That being said, both of my daughter's had drilled into their heads how expensive college would be by their HS teachers and staff. We're continually telling them not to worry about it, it's our responsibility to pay, not theirs, don't feel bad for not going into STEM, etc. Doesn't help that we live out west where anti-intellectualism is the default and a degree is just seen as a piece of paper.
As far as I'm concerned, besides the fields that deal with the fate of a person's life (like doctors and lawyers), the whole idea of going to college and getting a masters in whatever your heart's desire deserves to be imploded. I see no sense in those saying that we need to "fix universities". Honestly, fuck universities for acting they're worth as much as they are while still pretending their priority is the students. Everything I learned in college and the different schools I went to can now be learned online or at the library for free or for $29.99. In a few generations, universities will be naturally replaced with more practical alternatives. So why try to prop up these archaic institutions for the sake of the average person rather than the exceptional? Such a desire is more of a fetish for an image of what universities represent.
Excuse me? No one cares about fields that employ 2.8 million workers [BLS.gov 2020] ? No one cares about work that provides information, entertainment, and shapes political views? FYI your doctors, lawyers, and politician's biggest expense line items usually include money going to communications and media professionals.
I and many others resonate with the notion of 'useless degrees', but you chose some terrible examples. That said, there is more value to education than vocation, and your inability to see that shows that you missed quite a bit in yours. The classical liberal arts education could and should be continually reimagined for a changing world, but to wholly discount its importance is capitalist orthodoxy that misses much of what life is about. Read a goddamn book.
If college is important factor in improving economic outcomes, it shouldn't matter if you go to college at 18 or take a few years go at the age of 21 or even later in life. We have this stigma around adults who get a college degree later in life. I've met a several people who went to college as older adults (one at the age of 26 and the other at the age of 30) and ended up having highly lucrative careers. My mom got her masters at the age 55 (and rightfully lorded over my sister and I that if she get her degree with straight A while holding down a job, being a mom and in her 50s, then we have no excuses).
I believe college is valuable (though greatly overpriced in the US) but you don't need to be a young adult to attend. In terms of the labor effect of having fewer college graduates available for the labor market, honestly most jobs don't really require a college degree (including office and white collar jobs). Employers tend to use college degrees as cheap filtering signal instead having better hiring processes. Most entry level jobs have onboarding and training where college knowledge is not a perquisite for success.
On top of that, for certain professions, what is taught in colleges is an absolute joke. Computer science at my college had zero connection to what happens in the real world and I'm being completely honest when I tell you I can't think of a single thing I learned in college that I use in the real world. Even some of the more advanced types/concepts would be better taught in a ~1hr tutorial or video than how it was taught in my college.
I'm all for giving people a broad education (I think I liked my non-technical/math/science classes more than the ones pertaining to the major I was working towards) and I think college should do a better job preparing people for the "real world" (budgeting, meal planning, conflict resolution, etc - So should high schools).
I dropped out my junior year after being frustrated at feeling like I was wasting my time in classes that didn't prepare me. It was one the best decision I've ever made. I still got saddled with 3 years of debt but better than 4 and having no advantage at the end of it. I've never had an issue finding a job over the past decade+ and I'm making very good money (more than people I know who did graduate).
We need massive college reform in this country.
In the linked PDF, they note they don't have complete data on international students. "In recent years, IPEDS enrollments in the nonresident alien category have accounted for nearly five percent of all IPEDS enrollments."
Fall 2017 Fall 2018 Fall 2019 Fall 2020 Fall 2021
All Sectors -1.0% -1.7% -1.3% -2.5% -2.7%
Public 2-year -1.7% -3.2% -1.4% -10.1% -3.4%
Public 4-year -0.2% 0.0% -1.2% 0.2% -3.0%
Private nonprofit 4-year -0.4% 2.4% -0.6% -0.1% -1.6%
Private for-profit 4-year -7.1% -15.1% -2.1% 5.3% -9.3%
The article itself posits that it is tangentially related to costs as kids are choosing to work rather than pay for school. However, that association feels pretty shaky and doesn't hold up to scrutiny as to why these changes accelerated so rapidly during the pandemic.
I don't have a data-driven answer, either. However, my guess would be that students are uninterested in an online college experience and don't see the value in spending to attend a lucrative school so that they can then sit at home on their laptop. If I had to bet I would guess that enrollment ticks back once all these restrictions are abandoned.
A significant part of the recent downward trend could be because there are fewer college age people in the population. Just eyeballing it looks like fewer 18 year olds every year for the last 15 to 30 years? [1]
A more interesting statistic might be students per capita within the college age bracket.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Everyone is vaccinated, everyone is boosted, everyone wears their little masks, and they're still going remote, quarantining, and forbidding students from doing pretty much anything except sit in their dorms and watch remote teaching material.
Is it any wonder that a lot of students walk away? Everything that makes college fun is forbidden. Why the hell would you put up with that? If I want to sit in my room, not party, and watch education videos all day, why would I pay $50k for the privilege?
This is bullshit, and students aren't idiots, which is why a lot of them are dropping out and postponing their education until universities get their shit together.
"it could be there are fewer people and thus students, due to population growth slowing or reversing, or it could be it's unaffordable or unpromising?".
I hope it's from slowed population growth, but suppose it's the cost.
There's few private colleges (mostly international business schools I guess?), a large majority of students goes to the public universities. The eduction is free, but you pay a few hundred Euros per semester in administrative charges, which usually includes a ticket for city or state public transport.
You can get a loan from the state (BAföG) to cover living expenses, which you will pay back after finishing, when you have a job (well of course things are more complicated, but that's the gist). The maximum amount you have to pay back is 10.000 Euros, even if the size of the loan was larger.
My middle daughter wants to study art (she is an artist and sees a future in it for herself). My benefits will expire by the time she applies to college. So she’s not likely to end up at a four year university.
I have a hunch my youngest daughter may want to study computer science. Unless the cost of school changes I may put together a program for her myself mixed with online schools and traditional CS resources.
No, it isn't. A tight labor market which provides more opportunities for on-the-job training is positive for everybody except those who made their money selling fake tickets.
I made the mistake of thinking that the purpose was to get what is essentially a certificate stating that you went to a good school and got good grades.
I do think it was a net positive overall, but in reality I think I would've done just the same by going to school and networking, partying my ass off for 4 years, and then figuring it out after.
If you can do those things without going to college then it's a no brainer _not_ to go.
It can't be both ways. Unless of course you're the Higher Edu Industrial Complex and you know NPR and their ilk have no memory and no integrity.
Yes, there's some concern. There always is. But that doesn't make shamelessly crafting two opposing narratives.
However, Chinese graduates are in a similar situation as US college graduates.
It's hard to find a decent job with a college degree. The college degree was once the premium but now more like a baseline in many industrials. Now China wants to push more young men to go to the professional education track.
But the challenge is there are more issues in professional education than in college education here.
This is probably because the tuition fees have become so inflated that most people cannot recuperate the costs during their working career.
Whether this is good or bad is still an open question. I'd claim that we have too many college-degree professionals and that companies claim they need them, when they really don't.
This is likely some combination of Covid making college temporarily less attractive (the social connections are just as important as the education) and lower-income students who have families that need them during the pandemic (community college enrollment dropped by a higher 13%).
I would expect enrollment (at least at 4-year universities) to fully recover once the pandemic is well and truly over.
See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...
Whatever is causing this, it's ok part of a much bigger trend than can be explained by COVID, which has exacerbated but not caused this trend.
If the mantra is that everyone should go to university, then it becomes an extension of high school, and the credentials less valuable... and mostly the student loan industry thrives.
I presume there are cheap colleges and universities in the states as well that are just as educational as the big name schools.
according to Hege Ferguson, director of admissions for Florida State University, as of January 7, 2022, they have received 67,291 first-year applications for summer and fall semesters. That is a 21.2% increase compared to January 7, 2021, when they had received 55,500 applications.This is BAD. NEWS. for us Americans. How are we supposed to compete on an international scale if we are not training the next generation of knowledge workers[0]?
Part of the thing I always hated about Uni is that it felt very... kamikaze. You have one shot. I had to work during the day and go to school at night and going an extra year was NOT an option for me. It sucked to be on the hook for so much money when society didn't really make any room for me to actually learn and excel in that environment.
I suppose you could join the military. However, the military isn't for everyone. I don't know if would have had the mental fortitude to make it. Also, you lose out on some extremely productive years.
I know a lot of ex-soldiers who have severe disabilities, both mental and physical, from their time in training / on the field. Also, forcing everyone who wants to go into higher education into a propaganda mill isn't exactly a great idea either.
Also, the military doesn't just give you a credit card to go to any school you want. I had friends in school who struggled with the gi-bill system.
0: A term I an loathe to use, because I do not think other work is "dumb work", but it is a useful short-hand for workers who are working in jobs that require advanced education.
Zero undergraduates in 2065. You heard it here first! /j
- Depending on what you choose it might not even be rewarding
- You'll be saddled with crippling debt forever
Nah.
You're better off paying a couple of thousand for a coding bootcamp and have a better chance of finding some work and actually pay off the smaller debt you might have incurred.
It will help those who choose college, too - as demand for education falls, so will the prices.
- Housing - Education - Healthcare
If costs are too high for students to afford, why doesn’t the price fall? If it’s scarce why isn’t more of it produced?
Given the cost of education in the US, the value of college is questionable indeed.
I guess I just like simple language.
Is this a problem for society?
Obama explains it the best. (Ignore the right wing title its a good video of him on his first visit to Kenya)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fItxli7-uU0
Starts at 15:13
These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace.
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
The onus for training needs to be put on the businesses themselves. This is better for everyone including the businesses themselves. Putting in training requirements and a probationary period where new hires have to meet a certain threshold or be let go. The individual can then decide how best to learn.