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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

But that's exactly the point.

All growing up my generation was told, "Just get a degree! It doesn't matter what it's in, it doesn't matter what it costs, just get a degree!" There was no other acceptable route, so all the "good" kids went to college to get degrees.

That leaves parts of my generation racking up student loans they literally cannot pay off with the careers they will get, all the while assuming they'll be alright financially because "degree!"

Of course, college is a big bundle of things: Friends, connections, good time, hopefully skills to get a job. Of course, college is a great thing and completely necessary for some people. But there are a lot of people going into so much debt they would have been in a better position financially by not going.

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Up until maybe 30 years ago it made perfect sense to "just get a degree." College degrees were rare enough that they were a differentiator.

The people pushing to get any old degree were just following the logic of the world they grew up in. I suspect a lot of millenials will encourage their kids to get degrees in STEM fields and especially CS, even though in 30 years that won't be the best advice.

I'm left with the question of how hard can it be to google the job prospects of the degree you're interested in? It's never been easier to discover that sort of thing.

Even during the medieval (i.e. pre internet) times I attended college, the pay for various majors were well known. Highest was chemical, lowest astronomy.

This is something that is super-frustrating to communicate in these discussions. I end up talking with people from the previous generation a lot, and this is something I hear, "how did you not know that that was dumb and shallow?"

Here's how: from grade school up onto high school, kids in my generation were told, by literally every adult around, "get a degree, it doesn't matter what in, you'll get a good job." The language never differed, there was never talk of trades, of military service, of starting a business, none of that. Every single adult and authority figure said the same thing.

When you're young, even if you start questioning stuff like that, when everyone you turn to says the same thing, where are you supposed to go for other points of view?

Isn't part of the point of college to no longer unquestioningly accept what you're told by adults?

How can you go through 4 years of college and never even once google starting salaries in your chose profession? And none of your peers do either? And not notice any of the constant flow of articles on reddit and hackernews about this issue?

This is neither unknown nor secret nor obscure knowledge.

> Every single adult and authority figure said the same thing.

Not me. I've said otherwise for 40 years.

I said, "to hell with this" and dropped out, so I may not be the best person to ask, but I think "common knowledge" is more difficult to question than most people think. Especially when you don't recognize it as such.

Overall, the frustrating thing to watch is that the kids saddled with six figure student loans, a generic degree and no special skills were just playing by the rules. They were trying to find their passion and studying really hard just like good boys and girls should, then life kicks them in the teeth.

I think people in college now are much more cognizant of it, but five years ago people didn't talk about student loans as much.

Even five years ago, the student loans were significantly lower, right? I graduated 9 years ago, and I paid exponentially less. I can't even believe it when I see the tuition costs, even at my public university.

I find myself wanting to continue to give people the same advice I received, the same advice that served me so well, and the advice I believe in strongly—go to college. It will make you a better person. You will become yourself there, and improve yourself and grow. Better, improved, grown, whole people are the ones who earn more money, but that's a side-effect, not a goal.

But when tuition is four times what it was when I found that advice invaluable—it's much more difficult. Even in this thread I'm still giving the same narrative around the intangible and immeasurable value of a college education (I believe in it still, very strongly), but the cost is out of whack.

This is what an economic imbalance feels like, folks. There's beginning to be a huge rift between the perceived value of a university education (invaluable, extreme, incomparable experience, must-do, must-have) and the price (extremely high).

We cannot comprehend it. After all, who can put a price tag on being a better, improved, more whole person? Is it $20,000? Sure. What if we double it? $40,000? Sure, still invaluable. $80,000? Remains invaluable, intangible, unmeasurably important. $160,000? How can we deal with this? How can we put a price tag on a whole experience that remains, throughout all the number shifting, invaluable?

Needs intervention.

I still fully believe that the university experience is invaluable. But that's not the problem. The problem is that it's become overpriced because we are mentally unable to reconcile the immensity of its effect on a life with a single price tag. Thus, it is open to economic "play."

So we rail against it and come up with alternatives, and rationalize that it's not as invaluable as we thought it was after all, and, well, why don't we take some parts here and connect them with this series of tubes and voila! This is the same thing for only a fraction of the price; why would you ever go to that big overpriced agglomerated monster anyway when you can get these results right here?

All the while, I can't help but see holes in the real quality of the experience of growing up. You have to be smart about it, I guess.

Clearly, there's a reason this is an argument, and not a clear-cut case of college being valuable so you should go do it, and the reason is a price tag.

At least it's simple.

I'm not sure what your college experience (if any--I don't want to presume one way or another) was like, but I've had a chance to see it both from the science/industry perspective, i.e. the CS/engineering subjects, and from a language/art/music perspective (I myself have accumulated most of a couple of different degrees, in wildly divergent subjects, but not yet a whole one).

Seldom have I ever had the conversation with anyone about, "what kind of job will we get after ___?" For me, it isn't so relevant because my tech background lets me make money pretty easily. For others, it seems like the focus is almost always almost exclusively on finishing the schoolwork.

The schools themselves certainly never bring up the subject of any kind of career planning or job readiness, because that isn't really the role of the university--these aren't trade schools, after all.

Maybe they should, but if everyone's making the same mistake, then I find it hard to say "everyone is dumb/wrong," with an implication that they should all just suck it up and deal with having made some mistake. I think it makes more sense to look for social causes for why everyone's making the same mistake, and find a larger-scale solution than individual suffering of consequences.

As for this: "Not me. I've said otherwise for 40 years." I'm quite certain you weren't a part of the adult/authority figure group my peers and I had access to in the K-12 period of our lives. I find it commendable that you have said otherwise, but your ideas were absolutely not well-represented among the adults present in my generation's upbringing. So, it's great that you've been saying so, but not all that helpful in advancing the discussion.

> I find it commendable that you have said otherwise

Please, google "starting salaries for majors".

It's not any harder than that.

The thing is, unless advice I give says what people want to hear, they don't want to hear it. The most unwanted advice I give is to stop blaming others for ones' own decisions. Take responsibility for them. It's actually quite empowering.

When I went to college in the 70's, it was the custom for seniors to tape their job offer and rejection letters on their dorm door for all to see. You bet we talked about jobs after college. I specifically chose classes based on how valuable I thought they'd be to my future career choice, and so did plenty of others.

For example, lots of students quite deliberately did double majors, such as: "AY for fun, and EE for money." This was decades before google. Everyone knew that there were no jobs in AY.

I'm not sure why you're taking such a sanctimonious approach here.

I'm also not sure why you keep repeating this advice, as though I or anyone on this board need to hear it.

My point, which I'll try to make again, is that, among my peer group and in my generation, the universally prevalent idea was, "get a degree in anything, you'll get a job," full stop. (Please, don't take this as a sign that I need you to tell me to "google starting salaries for majors" again!). When you're a 16 year old without much technical aptitude--not me, but certainly my friends--that sounds like a good proposition! The schools won't do anything to disabuse the incoming students of that, either. Why would they? Every department wants a steady influx of students, so none of them are going to say, "nope, no jobs here!"

I think you probably grew up in quite a different era, which is why I keep getting a sense of "kids these days" in your messages.

I do kind of wonder what it would take to get you to empathize with people who grew up in a different time, under different circumstances, people who are part of a substantial cohort, who all acted in good faith on bad life advice and are all paying a substantial price for it.

If, in response, you're going to say "just google it!" or "personal responsibility!" then please, let's save us all the typing and let it go.

"Do what you love -- the money will come!"

> "get a degree, it doesn't matter what in, you'll get a good job."

What generation is that? I was in college in the late 90s and growing up I was never told just go to college. It was always become a medical doctor or lawyer.

About as hard as it is to understand that correlation does not imply causation, but these people were still expecting career success out of their education anyway. The downside of making education available to everyone is that you get everyone.

The point of college is not to maximize your earning potential.

It is to improve yourself, invest in yourself, and become a better human being. Higher pay is a possible side-effect.

I'm frustrated by comments like these that lump all of "my generation" into one bucket, as if the variety of people all around the same age can be combined into a single undifferentiated mass. Was your generation told this? The answer, as with so many things in life is, "It depends." Some millennials were probably given bad information that lead them to make poor choices. Some were given bad information but nonetheless were able to see past it to make good choices. Some just had rich parents so they were able to go to college without accruing any debt at all. Lumping 80 million people together (the majority of whom will never get a degree) is silly.

>I'm frustrated by comments like these that lump all of "my generation" into one bucket, as if the variety of people all around the same age can be combined into a single undifferentiated mass.

The scope of parent's comment is set at generation. Or specifically "my generation", localizing the experience to a time and place.

>The answer, as with so many things in life is, "It depends." Some millennials were probably given bad information that lead them to make poor choices. Some were given bad information but nonetheless were able to see past it to make good choices. Some just had rich parents so they were able to go to college without accruing any debt at all.

I had a similar experience as parent: the hubris of college education ejaculated throughout my k-12 education. Some of us saw through the BS, but there are plenty of people wondering what the hell kind phony dream they bought into, another American dream-bubble bursting with ulterior motives.

>Lumping 80 million people together (the majority of whom will never get a degree) is silly.

Culture is amorphous and hard to grasp in the present, arguably more difficult as time passes. But there are historical themes that can be said to have affected the "mind of the generation". I would call "get a college education" one of those themes, which has been pretty consistent from my interactions with people. Example: coming from older people "are you in school?" "No." "Shame on you."

But that's exactly the point.

All growing up we were told, "Be a generalist, not a specialist" There was no other acceptable route, so all the "good" kids identified patterns to get ahead.

That leaves many of us barking up when we notice a pattern. Of course, a generalization is a big bundle of things: abstractions, ceteris paribus, the act of generalizing, a general statement, pattern naming

I hear people say this all the time, but I don't remember being told this. I remember being told to go to college and to get a 'good' degree (this was well before STEM was a common term) meaning something not liberal arts and preferably something math heavy (although business is also good). I was told to meet people and talk to companies which come to colleges campus a lot. I was told to try new things and experiment and figure out what I liked and who I was. I remember having people who didn't go to college come in and talk to us, and people who went to vocational schools and people who enlisted in the military. They all said "if you college isn't your thing, there are other ways to having a fulfilling career." I was never told, "get a degree no matter the cost."

This was evident during the first semester of freshman year of college. Freshman everywhere were sure they were going to be the next bestselling author, or the next insightful historian, or the next psychologist to make a huge breakthrough. They all knew it was hard to get a cushy job in those soft fields, they just thought they'd be the one to do it out of every incoming freshman in every school in every state in the country.

People seem to forget that a law degree was probably the most common example of a "good degree" you'd hear about in the 90's. And if you want to get a law degree, the American Bar Association recommends an undergraduate degree in "history, English, philosophy, political science, economics or business."

"I remember being told to go to college and to get a 'good' degree (this was well before STEM was a common term) meaning something not liberal arts and preferably something math heavy..."

I'm curious when the meaning of "liberal arts" changed. When I was in college liberal arts was a superset of STEM - well, at least SM. Physics was just as much a liberal arts field as history. A vocationally-focused degree in, say, criminology wouldn't be liberal arts, and neither would a self-guided major in peace studies. It seems like lately I've seen more and more people use the term as meaning 'all humanities, social sciences, and anything else that seems fluffy', which seems surprising to me. (Not that the comment above necessarily means it this way, though it does seem kind of close in spirit).

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