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> I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone

The idea that this stigma exists is mostly a conservative pundit talking point used to justify cutting education budgets. If you look at labor market data, it's unsubstantiated. And if you visit middle America, you'll find plenty of people with disdain for college degrees.

The United States doesn't have an over-abundance of people with tertiary degrees.

The USA in the bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds, less than half of whom obtained ANY form of post-highschool education -- including community college.

More importantly, many high-growth fields are also high-tech and require tertiary education or exceptional self-teaching.

The problem isn't an over-supply of college educated workers. Rather, the problem is an unwillingness to subsidize tertiary education together with the misconception that college without accompanying training in employable skills is a worthwhile investment.

>The USA in the bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds, less than half of whom obtained ANY form of post-highschool education -- including community college.

There are really only 5-6 countries who have significantly higher tertiary attainment than the US. US is definitely not bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds.

What do tertiary degrees get you? If you're an employer, why would you want to employ these people?

The answer is mostly completely obvious, and the fact that you're even asking makes me wonder if you're trolling (EDIT: apologies, I over-reach). Here are some categories of jobs for which most people don't or can't self-teach, or where a tertiary degree is the default route:

Huge swaths of the medical profession (MDs, BSNs, PAs, DOs, Pharm.D.'s, ...)

Non-BSN nurses and expert tradesmen and craftsmen (tertiary == post-secondary, which includes community college!!!)

Engineers

Lawyers, clerks, etc.

Accountants

Actuaries

Industrial scientists and their surrounding support structure

Lots of mid- and uppoer-level management in every sector (many of these roles really do require a tertiary or higher command of statistics and other skills)

Educators

The whole army of support roles that require an excellent command of written language (good communicators are hard to find, and more often than not have tertiary degrees... those English majors really do often actually learn how to very write well)

Even software engineers. I know it's an unpopular opinion round these parts, but the huge majority of excellent software engineers have a tertiary education in CS or a related field (Math, physics, etc.).

Could all this stuff be taught without a four+ year degree(s)? Some of it could. Most of it couldn't -- not well, at least.

In short, employers hire these people because it's either impossible or very difficult to find people who are ready to work in these roles (or, in rare cases, are even legally permitted to do so) straight out of high school.

It was a genuine question, and here's why:

if these advanced degrees possess such importance to their respective fields that employers will refuse to hire anyone who hasn't attained them, that simply means that the employers have outsourced a large portion of their on-the-job training to public education. This is troubling, as why should my [insert some other college degree] subsidize companies of lawyers, accountants, actuaries?

And if the above is true, the signalling theory also holds -- by an applicant showing up with the degree, they demonstrate that they've taken significant steps to increase their attractiveness and employability to the employer. It's a competitive advantage. And that competitive advantage is eroded if a large fraction of the population also attains the same degree.

> It was a genuine question

Sorry for the snark then, I've edited my comment.

> that employers will refuse to hire anyone who hasn't attained them

FWIW I think that's different from what you asked -- refusing to hire people without degrees is different from hiring people with degrees, and is also different from hiring people because they have degrees.

It's possible that an employer hires only people with degrees and also doesn't discriminate on the basis of the degree. In fact, I'd say that's more likely than not for most technical positions. The mere fact pf the matter is that most people learn technical skills in tertiary educational programs.

> that simply means that the employers have outsourced a large portion of their on-the-job training to public education

This is unavoidable. Learning to read, write, do basic mat, basic science, etc. are all crucial skills that job readiness programs need to build on top of.

Mind you, there are also a lot of other reasons we as a society might want to subsidize education and even particular types of education. E.g., a lot of people argue that health care costs should be addressed on the supply side as well as the demand side.

> And if the above is true, the signalling theory also holds

You go astray here because you assume that education doesn't actually impart real and useful skills that directly benefit the employer. In most cases, the degree is more than a mere signal.

edit: apologies for typos; commuting.

This is "outsourced" to the public sector because it's very hard for an employer to ensure that they're the ones who will benefit from the expenses of on-the-job training - it's hard to take back the training you've given someone if they decide to leave for another company tomorrow. And we have, as a society, decided that we do not want a system in which companies can force their employees to stay.

So, public education. In some countries (e.g. Germany) this is actually funded by industries as a bloc contributing to education in their fields, to reduce the free-rider problem while still allowing market signals to operate, but that's still a quasi-public system.

Most notably computational finance and research in the natural sciences (material, biochem, physics) all require tertiary degrees since those courses are simply not available at the undergraduate level.

The benefits of hiring these people by the financial and the pharma sector should be obvious.

It sounds like you've confused tertiary with post-graduate.

Tertiary typically means post-secondary. Secondary typically means US high school or equivalent. (from wiki: " The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers.[1]")

So the electrician with a CC degree has a tertiary education. Of course, so does the Ph.D.

Hopefully that clarifies the magnitude of the fact that fewer than 1/2 of young Americans obtained a tertiary degree...

Sure, but these fields are known for being selective, and objectively requiring a very high level of domain-specific knowledge. Presumably, they will remain this way in the future, despite the cost of education rising.

Notably, if the field doesn't objectively require a very high level of domain-specific knowledge, but rather a general baseline command of a broad topic, eg. software development?

> Sure, but these fields are known for being selective

Lots of fields that aren't so selective also require a tertiary (= post-highscool) education of some form. Most notably, a huge swath of jobs in health care that involve patient contact.

> Notably, if the field doesn't objectively require a very high level of domain-specific knowledge, but rather a general baseline command of a broad topic, eg. software development?

It's of course possible to become a competent software developer without a tertiary education. I know, I did it (programming job offers right out of high school).

But it's not common, and the secondary education system in the USA isn't set up to enable that sort of thing at scale. IMO it should, but it doesn't, and subidizing tertiary education is far more likely to succeed, and at lower cost, than such a drastic reform to such a huge sprawling institution.

Another piece of the problem, at least in the US, is the that a high school diploma, the highest degree attainable by purely public funding, is a certification of only the barest level of competency in communication and arithmetic.

The requirement for "BA or equivalent" in so many situations isn't because that position requires four years of advanced study; it's because four years of advanced study usually means a candidate can at least express themselves well in writing, think critically and do long division.

There is a constant pressure to push down the standard of a high school diploma. It feels so bad for people to see students try and fail, and there is the usual pressure from the parents of special needs kids.

My personal feeling is we should give everyone a diploma, but list some sort of grade level attainment. If nothing else, it would help universities place students into the remedial classes they sometimes need.

It's not even that college isn't for everyone because there's jobs like plumbing for which you don't need a bachelor's degree for work, or to obtain the job.

It's that there's jobs like credit analyst which require a degree to obtain, which absolutely, do not, at all, require a degree.

It's mostly the latter that is so insane to me, and the solution isn't for kids to recognise they don't need the degree. Because if employers ask for one, even though it's stupid, they have little choice but to accept the system. (and no, not everyone can just start their own company and beat the system).

I have friends who have credit analyst jobs, they're literally on the phone contacting clients to pay back their debt if they forgot, and propose a payback plan if they have issues paying. That's about it. The title is one where you expect an undergrad degree and employers require one most of the time, but by age 16 most people have the competencies, safe for the deep voice and calm professional phone demeanour, to do this job.

And that scares me most. These degrees cost $30-50k, and they're useless, yet required. That really has to change.

The key point is this:

A degree should be a proxy for competence and skills particular to the job. i.e. you studied marketing, so let's hire you for a marketing job because you've got the skills.

But what a degree really is to employers, is a proxy for ambition, young-urban-professional normalcy, perhaps some level of a proxy for ethnicity or at least congeniality (oh, this employee will be like me, has a wife, kids, normal life, is dependable, not volatile etc), a proxy for a person valuing the long-term etc. i.e., oh you studied marketing, let's hire you for an unrelated job requiring no skills, because this degree is an easy first-order way to filter out the type of people we don't want to hire.

And that's bs, because it treats education as a giant money-wasting institution for employers to weed out those who aren't keen on following the system, or who see through it. That's NOT what education should be about and it's a travesty. Almost all my peers who went to uni didn't give a rats ass about learning as part of their formal uni education, it was simply not a part of their decision making process for university. Despite that, they're all curious, interesting individuals, who learn in their own time about their particular interests. That's really sad.

And that concerns me. Students choosing to pursue a skilled career over plumbing is another concern, but not nearly as significant for me (and in some cases not a concern at all).

A big proponent of the type of things you're talking about is Mike Rowe.

He created a foundation "that rewards people with a passion to get trained for skilled jobs that actually exist": http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

>I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone.

That's the problem, not the solution. College should be for everyone. There's no reason why a person who becomes a plumber or peace corps volunteer or electrician can't also go to college and learn those things, among other topics.

In 2015, only 33% of American adults had a college degree [0]. American adults are not over-educated, they're just over-charged for their education.

[0]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

College is a waste of time and money for almost everyone who attends . In the 1960's, less than 10% of Americans had college degrees. Yet, we still had engineers and accountants and insurance adjusters, etc. Very few people, even white collar workers, learn anything essential in college.

The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste.

> The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste.

Hanlon begs that we consider the possibility that a pedestrian understanding of basic statistics and market forces are the more likely culprit for public perception.

Aside, you've also picked the wrong boogeyman.

Outside of the elite institutions, where the .01% of rock-star professors MAYBE make as much as a typical software developer at a top software firm, professors come in nowhere near upper-middle class. At typical institutions, they make mid-5 figures, have no upward mobility in their professions, and are a favorite target for pot shots and threats of funding cuts because everyone loves to hate them. In all, it's a pretty unappealing job outside of the social capital with traditional types and the carrot of tenure (which isn't nearly as permanent as it's often perceived).

The financial industry and university managers that are benefiting from peddling of useless college degrees, not professors.

You can throw administrators into "professorial caste" (though note that professors still dominate payroll at most places: http://data.richmond.com/salaries/2014/state/george-mason-un...).

And how is the financial industry benefitting from the peddling of useless college degrees? Private student loans only account for 8% of student loan debt (the federal government holds the rest).

> You can throw administrators into "professorial caste"

That makes about as much sense as throwing the C-suite of a manufacturing company into the "laborer caste". Administrators these days mostly aren't former professors and have very different jobs.

> Here are the salaries of professors at George Mason

First and most important, GMU falls into that "elite" class I mentioned earlier. It's atypical; as an R1 institutions, their professors are paid on average far better than professors at the huge majority of higher ed institutions in the US.

Outside of places like GMU, professors make closer to mid five figures. Again, we don't have to speculate. Use Google if you don't believe me.

Even then, you'll notice my point still stands -- the reporting you linked to just completely tops out around the typical base salary of top tech firms. If professors are benefiting, they aren't exactly getting rich.

> The payroll is dominated by professors

1. "Dominated" is a bit of a stretch. The page you link lists 4,043 employees, and other GMU data states there are 1,263 full-time instructors (which will include non-professors, BTW).

2. GMU has an atypically small student:teacher ratio.

3. It doesn't follow that professors benefiting the most from this growth.

4. At a place like GA, professors are also typically bringing in more money into the university in the form of grants.

> And how is the financial industry benefitting from the peddling of useless college degrees?

> Private student loans only account for 8% of student loan debt

So "only" 80,000,000,000. Not to mention handling endowments, etc.

How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...

> If professors are benefiting, they aren't exactly getting rich.

I didn't say they were rich. I said they were upper middle class. The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/aaup-survey-f.... Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k.

My point is that academic jobs are generally well-paying and secure, and they're paid-for by kids taking out huge debt to keep the whole show going. And the show keeps going because we tell fairy tales about the importance of a college education.

> How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...

First, a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll. The vast majority of the $500 billion spent on higher education each year isn't going to financiers. It's going to faculty, facilities, etc. Second, the financiers wouldn't be getting rich either if we went back to only sending 10% of the population to college.

> My point is that academic jobs are generally well-paying and secure

That is a completely wrong assumption for the United States. 66% of faculty positions today are non-tenure track, also known as adjunct or contingent faculty (source: http://agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforc...). Median salary for adjunct faculty is $31k a year (source: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Adjunct_Professor/Sa...)

> GMU is a commuter school ranked outside the top 100

GMU is R1.

R1 unis compensate faculty unusually well compared to other institutions, regardless of other social prestige indicators. R1-level compensation is not typical of US universities, period.

> The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000

You've grossly mis-interpreted this data.

Notice that the data breaks down salaries by the type of institution (phd-granding, masters-granding, bachelor-only) .

The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.

Many professors never become full professors or become full professors very late in their career (55+).

According to your data, the average for an Associate Professor is $70,334 - 88,306, which is a better comparison because most professors are not full professors for most of their career (especially at non-R1 schools, where budgets often trump professional competence considerations in terms of full professorship appointments).

Also, many full-time instructional staff aren't professors. Instructors make average or below-average salaries (your data says $45-$57 average).

> Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k

Unless we adjust for the fact that all professors have bachelors degrees, then we add 10-20k depending on your data source.

So typical professors 10-20k above average and typical instructors make maybe a few k extra or below average.

Oh, and note that this is all the upper tier of the tertiary education system. Instructors at community colleges are often doing so as a second job or scraping by on less than their students make in their first positions -- far more akin to high school teachers in terms of social status and earning power than anything else. Damn leeches...

Upper middle class indeed... eye roll

> a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll.

It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.

We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.

> Notice that the data breaks down salaries by the type of institution (phd-granding, masters-granding, bachelor-only) .

> The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.

Okay, fair point. But schools that don't grant a doctoral degree are also the cheapest institutions (elite liberal arts colleges aside)--the ones where students aren't taking out huge student loan debt to attend. So those aren't really the target of my ire.

> It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.

You're fixated on some people getting rich when the real problem is that we spend $500 billion a year on giving kids higher education that very few of them actually need. That's the big waste.

If we cut our higher-education spending by 1/3, we could cut a $10,000 check each year to every single kid in poverty. If we cut it by 2/3, we could additionally pay for health insurance for every uninsured American.

We're forgoing game changing improvements in quality of life so that a bunch of 18-22 year olds can waste time learning things they'll forget the minute they graduate.

> We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.

My argument isn't that "professors are paid too much." It's that we have too much higher education. Higher education is intrinsically expensive: as you say, professors are necessary input, they get paid above average wages, and we're not automating them away anytime soon. Consequently, we shouldn't encourage millions of kids each year to take on huge amounts of debt to get an education that's worthless.

> My argument isn't that "professors are paid too much."

Well, okay.

> It's that we have too much higher education.

This seems well-covered in other threads. I'll just say two things:

1. A secondary education from a typical US high school is woefully insufficient for most well-paying jobs in the USA, and this is only likely to become more true over time.

2. Employers are on balance unwilling to invest in educating and training workers.

The argument about what to do is one we should perhaps have, and has been had in other threads, but it is most important to realize the need for something beyond high school.

You'll be hard pressed to find many of these "we have too much higher education" claimants who don't send their kids to college. rayiner himself is a lawyer.

No, it's always other people's kids who shouldn't go to college. Is that because there is 'too much higher education' or because they know that if everyone has that level of education, it's more difficult for their kid to succeed easily?

How many of these "there's too much higher education" folks can be heard calling Americans 'stupid' for not knowing x-y-z, 'foolish' for not investing in a/b/c or falling into this cultural or financial pitfall or another?

"Stupid people" are the only group in America that it's politically correct to make fun of, yet, rayiner wants people to be less educated. Why might that be?

Could it be that those who already have financial success due to their education -- much of which was bought and paid for by relatives and taxpayers -- don't want to lose their easy success and their cultural punching bags?

What other benefit is a population unexposed to the topics of higher education? That has never been made clear to me.

>College is a waste of time and money for almost everyone who attends.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics disagrees [0], As do the hiring managers at even lower level positions [1]

[0]http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm [1]http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/09/report-employ...

Correlation, not causation. Going to college doesn't make someone smarter, harder working, or more ambitious. Employers just use it as a signal for those things.

>Going to college doesn't make someone smarter, harder working, or more ambitious.

And the BLS didn't measure those qualities, they measured earnings and unemployment. I suppose it's a waste of time if you don't value money or being employed.

Since 3 out of 4 adults reported that money is the primary cause of stress in their lives [0]...it seems that doing the thing that makes it less likely to be unemployed might not be a waste of time after all.

[0]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-biggest-cause-of-stress-in-a...

College != Education. Education should be for anyone who wants it. However, the returns on a college education (especially if the monetary costs are high) are highly dependent on the abilities (IQ, grit, conscientiousness, etc) of the individual in question. It is a bad investment for a lot of people.

I don't think Peace Corp really encourages non college grads from joining, and I'd strongly discourage any 18 year old from signing up.

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear. I had intended to say they'd be in the Peace Corps if they didn't have to deal with so much debt in the now. I re-read my post and see how murky that meaning is, sorry.

Absolutely. Most of those my age who didn't go into tech and got 'regular' jobs are absolutely filled to the brim with debt with zero way out. Those here in Chicago who have tech jobs aren't able to find jobs that match their skill.

My highschool was mostly in the lower/lower-middle class range with upper-middle in honor's programs. Multiple times per year, they gave presentations about the absolute, unwavering importance of a college education with money rather than success as the reason to go. Just about every student I've talked to who actually went through it is absolutely miserable - especially those who went to a university rather than the local community college. The only people who didn't have this issue were the honor's students, who either received scholarships or had money already. I seriously question the judgement, noise and in some ways, misery caused by those presentations.

Every time career comes up with my family and old classmates, I'm still looked down on for not having a degree... Even though I'm objectively more successful than the people telling me to go to college..

The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.

Well as much as I appreciate your earlier points, I do want to comment:

> The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.

That it's you who's showing survivor-bias. The data as far as I'm aware of it, does indeed confirm, that a college degree is a net financial benefit, despite of course obvious substantial anecdotal evidence to the contrary that every person is familiar with (my friend xyz got a degree and he's doing shitty). I'm purely talking historically, and financially.

Even today I'm seeing a job market where you can't get a traineeship in most companies without a master's degree, as silly as that may be.

Also I want to stress that tech is very, very much an exception. A field where more than most, you can get access to jobs on the basis of your work, not your work in school. I feel HN underappreciates the difference with the rest of the population.

In terms of happiness, fulfilment etc, I can't speak on that.

Also, I can't speak on how this'll develop in next generations, e.g. for those going to college today or later this decade, but I suspect like most that there'll be a big paradigm shift making college way less appealing.

At the end of the day, the benefits of college can be seen as an arbitrage opportunity in the market. i.e., spend X money for education, get Y (which is > X) benefits in income in return. And like any arbitrage opportunity, X will increase in cost and Y will decrease, as more people are drawn to the opportunity, until it largely fades. (or worse, temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).

> temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).

Or software engineers in the near future, given the hockey-stick growth in enrollments...

which brings up another important benefit of a high-quality tertiary education: when done right, it reduces the barrier to entry for a variety of professions in a variety of industries.

If the bubble exists and bursts tomorrow, people who went to university and obtained an education in both CS and in something else will have an alternative to temporary unemployment. Those who went directly into industry jobs out of high school are less likely to have a broad set of skills and knowledge to fall back on.

The benefit is not only to the individual -- countries with adaptable work forces have adaptable economies; countries with work forces that are trained exclusively for this decade's cog factories (the engine plants of mom's world are the app dev shops of today) will lag behind when global demand for cogs dies off and widgets become the new lexus of growth and prosperity.

I agree that I'm an example of a particular survivorship, but that's not really my point. I'm kind of trying to get out of the usual tech force right now with a focus on investigative journalism. Going that route is an acknowledgement of my survivorship bias while attempting to play my part in making things mildly better.

I would love to see these conversations move towards discussion on happiness, fulfillment, etc of college. The lack of discussion is 95% of my frustration in these subjects and almost always leads towards the economic value of college, while ignoring the individual. College is ultimately supposed to help get access to a happier life through comfort, stability, etc, but my generation overall is very unlikely to get that with the state of their loans. It's really sad.