Americans Losing Faith in College Degrees, Poll Finds
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's all become very cost-benefit, and while the discussion is a reasonable one to have, most of our entrepreneurship comes from educational environments and a lot of the benefits of education can't be directly measured.
I mean, there is a reason Tesla had to hire a Swedish company to do the interior design of their cars and that Scandinavian design is increasingly more influential in to world. We're not born better artists/designers, but we do have a nurturing environment for those sort of things to grow and a way for the designers to form easy partnerships with business degrees to be successful.
I did project management and later general management autodidactic for a while. It worked perfectly fine, but after taking a degree in management I find myself wondering how the hell it ever worked.
Gut feeling, a clever mind and a willingness to learn on your own will get you a long way, and you can absolutely succeed without education. But academia not only teaches you tested methods it also teaches you why you use them and how to determine which ones are best suited for a given situation.
Online delivery doesn't work well for seminars or labs, but basic proficiency with lecture material before enrolling and taking out a student loan would boost the graduation rate. Currently only 59% of students enrolled in a college program in the US complete their four-year degree six years down the road https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
Basically you're trading the freedom to choose to go in debt for a personal decision, for going in debt for the average decision in your country. I'm ok with it, but I think it's a very different philosophy. A similar thing when I see single payer health care proposals in the US where they say it's too costly. Well d'uh. You gotta charge health care tax. It's not free, it's just that everyone is paying into the same pool. I'm paying almost 700€ a month for my socialized health insurance. Mostly because it's adapted to your income. But it's really not low cost or free. Just that everyone is paying together.
In the US, I can't 100% defend our universities (of which I am a product...both engineering and MBA) of achieving this (which would be a fine) goal.
In fact, in the US, it's proabably easier to be skeptical of "The Ivory Tower", where one hears what will work and should be done, only to go into the field, and find out it's a bunch of non-practical garbage from a textbook some prof wanted to sell.
I can certainly think of examples at earlier stages of US education, like the (effectively) compulsory daily pledge of allegiance.
I'm not sure anyone is actually convinced by it, but it sure does seem we are convinced we can't implement an alternative.
Money doesn't matter when you're 21, and rich in health, family and friends. Money matters soo much when you're 56, tired, boring, and have a bad back.
Pretty much the same thing happened to me. I wish I wasn't so late to the party, I could have had my house paid off my now.
Still, I dream there was a less stressful way of going about it all.
There is a disturbing trend of mob rule where student activists become increasingly obsessed with the silliest things they perceive as "opression" and try to silence every voice at university campuses that doesn't toe the line with their worldview of intersectional feminism, cultural marxism and postmodern power games.
Points in case:
The idea that Yale students are smart enough to choose their own Halloween costumes made a mob of activists feel "unsafe" and they threw a fit, bullying two professors (who voiced this idea) for days until they resigned. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...
A transgender candidate (masculine-of-center genderqueer) for the position of "multicultural affairs coordinator" at Wellesley college had to pull out of the race because his opponents accused him of having become a white male and that's not "diverse" enough. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/magazine/when-women-becom...
Then there's Evergreen College. I'm at a loss of words to describe the level of crazy that went on there, but here's Jonathan Haidt's take on it: https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/05/27/this-weeks-witch-hun...
No, it is because they have marketable (in demand) skill(s).
If the whole country received a degree in history, would Denmark be as rich as it is today? They have an "education" right?
I think focusing on "marketable" is not a good governmental policy. It seems to me that education is the correct level of focus in terms of governmental policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Denmark Under the Danish tax system, it is possible for a high-wage earner to pay up to 51.5% of their total income after gross tax, giving a total of 57% of total income.
The actual number, as a percentage of your income, that you pay in the US is very likely around - if not higher - than 50%.
And... there's a weird hump, because capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate. in that bracket, you have the very top end of those who work as employees, and small business owners who end up having to pay income tax on their profits. Much above that and most of your income is usually in the form of capital gains, and thus taxed less.
IME academia absolutely does not teach that, most academics wouldn't know how to determine that. What tool to apply for a given situation is something I'd say is only learned with and can only be learned from industry experience.
For example, my day to day work would be much more pleasant of academia didn't go overboard making students create OO hierarchies for everything.
Cannot speak for non-STEM though.
I also highly doubt that he "had to hire" swedes. And if he did that would be an indication that something besides education was the reason. Education is in many countries if swedes are special, it must be something else.
So he says, but I have yet to see roles in Tesla's core business units that don't require post-secondary education.
However, did nobody else experience the dumbing down of colleges like I have? I was told growing up that college courses were taught by educated, experienced professors. Yet every year I was there though I got more and more adjunct professors who were working second jobs at supermarkets to make ends meet and TAs who were required to teach a course for their graduate degree but should have never passed the course they were teaching in the first place. The absolute worst I had was an economics course where some TA spent _every_, _single_ class at the whiteboard muttering to herself and trying to draw the charts in our textbook from memory but failing utterly to do so.
The entire class complained to the university and they didn't even respond. We all just stopped caring because we given decent grades anyway and pushed through in our degrees.
It is no wonder that people lose faith in the colleges when they let that happen and still award you with a degree like you learned something
I mean, it's natural to want both of those things, and sometimes, there's some inefficiency that can be fixed that makes things both better and less expensive, but... not usually. Usually, if you want better workers to do a task, you have to pay more, and that costs money.
My own impression is that instructor quality varies a lot by institution, though I have never met a college professor who wasn't dramatically better than what you'd expect based on pay.
I only did 2 years of college because I couldn't decide on a major that I was committed enough to justify the mountain of debt at the time. I was starting to work in the film industry and knew film school be a waste. I'm a habitual self-learner so not too sour.
Compared to a silicon valley tech company, everyone at just about any college works for peanuts - and education, if you ask me, is way more important than advertising.
Personally, I'd compare education to defense; as I wrote on another comment, I want the other people who get to vote on the laws on my country to have an education, just like I don't want other countries to be able to invade mine. Both of these things, I think, effect my safety.
The military also might not be particularly efficient, but we've prioritized effectiveness over efficiency. I think that a strong argument can be made that we should do the same with education.
I personally have no formal education to speak of. I'm working on changing that, though, and not for financial reasons.
When charted by price increase tuition outstrips housing and healthcare which ,I at least would, have considered to have skyrocketed in the past few decades[1]
This is all for static information. Math doesn't change, basic comp sci algorithms don't change, classical mechanics don't change, and basic chemistry doesn't change.
These arguments might not hold for graduate degrees or higher but most Americans are experiencing the undergraduate programs
[1http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d77553fcadcbb551d2...
In the end, if you want a good teacher, you need someone who is both inspiring and who understands the edges of the particular field to teach, and those people have other options when it comes to the job market.
My impression is that wages for skilled in-demand labor have been going up with housing, healthcare and education... in fact, my impression is that the wages in-demand labor can demand drives the first two of those things. I thought the third was driven by lack of government investment; colleges are a lot less subsidized than they used to be.
Such as tuition and administrative budgets and endowments ballooning while teacher salaries stay flat?
Is that what is happening? I honestly don't know, but I thought increased tuition was mostly a matter of government cutting subsidies.
Some of these schools are teaching things on the cutting edge, but how much of that applies to undergraduate degrees? Most of what you get taught there has been the same for decades if not centuries.
Universities have had rising costs, but much of that is due to things tangential to actually teaching their students. My own college for instance would completely rip out all of the flowers every few months and replace them so that the campus looked nice to prospective students .
eh, I think there's a lot to be said for rubbing shoulders with industry notables when you are learning the basics. It can be inspiring.
But then, there's also a lot to be said for teachers who are good teachers; that can be inspiring too, in a different way.
>Universities have had rising costs, but much of that is due to things tangential to actually teaching their students. My own college for instance would completely rip out all of the flowers every few months and replace them so that the campus looked nice to prospective students .
I went to a high school that... looked like a prison. I mean, how it looked was certainly not the first thing I'd change, but it's certainly something I would change. Look at any of the silicon valley tech companies... all of them spend a lot of effort making their campus nice, and personally, I think education is a lot more important to society than advertising.
I had to live on campus for one year and the room was 182 square feet for 2 people to live in with their bed, desks, clothes, and everything else for the year. With this little space they would also kick you out during summer and holidays so you got 8 months of the year there where they currently charge 6,838. It is not much better than a prison in terms of space or looks on the inside. Even the mattresses were the same as the ones you'd find at a prison or summer camp.
I still agree with you that education is important. Schools are no longer selling an education though. They are selling an overpriced "college experience" and giving you the same amount of knowledge that you could get with wikipedia and some text books, and they charge extra for the textbooks
Dropping algebra requirements (something that should be required to graduate from high school), including remedial classes as college credit in the largest state school systems is total insanity. It's crafting High School 2.0.
For the very rich (for whom tuition is still insignificant) or the poor and minorities (who win from various forms of non loan financial aid), it seems like college is a rational choice. Otherwise, unless you really need the degree for a specific credentialed career (government, law, or medicine), I would probably discourage college.
I do wish I could do a phd in infosec+economics somewhere today, but that is really the only thing I can't readily do without an undergrad degree.
Slam universities for many reasons, but the students going aren't graduating in arts; they're doing what employers say they want and still not getting jobs.
Universities have many problems, but they still are useful. We have all these STEM graduates but no one seems to be hiring them.
[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.a...
Not to mention under employment and people that have just givin up.
If you can't get on the computer once a month, spend some time on dice and send a few resumes, the problem is not the economy; the problem is your mental health.
I mean, I'm not saying those people shouldn't be helped; but having more jobs available won't help them if they aren't looking. They need a psychologist or social worker or something. Depression is way more treatable than it used to be.
Dirty secret about the "IT" degrees. I know managers with MIS, CIS, CIT, and similar degrees, but I don't know anyone who got such a degree before they had a solid IT job, who went on to get a solid IT job.
Yes, the guidance councilor will imply that it's like a CS degree without the math, but as far as I can tell, it's the "management addon" to your existing IT skills.
As far as individual contributor jobs, at least in my experience? you are better off with a philosophy degree.
Students are encouraged to study what their hearts tell them and not consider outcomes. That is employability. I personally know recent grads that are dramatically under employed. They could earn more, much more if they were trades people.
Berkeley is even cheaper, and at least by what you are likely to learn, if not who you will learn with, better. You can go to Berkeley for four years for less than the cost of one of those giant trucks that are often paired with artistically applied recreational mud and confederate battle flags, if you've got housing covered elsewhere.
As far as luxury goods go, College is an excellent value, and that is only one of the ways you can derive value from college.
But yes, college, I think, is a good deal, an excellent value. But it's not affordable for the poor, even state and community colleges, which in California are pretty close to free, well, you need to be able to afford not to work for that time.
But... my point is that if you want to make college more affordable, you should focus on subsidizing it, not on cost-cutting. Education, I think, is that last thing a society wants to make worse.
And in light of America's student loan crisis, what politician in his right mind is going to propose subsidizing college education even more? It would be nice, but it is unrealistic.
That is why MOOCs are so important -- a Stanford and Berkeley-caliber education can be made available on a massive scale, for much less than the standard tuition nowadays. People do not recognize it, or do not want to recognize it, but we are in an Industrial Revolution-like period for higher education.
Don't I know it. I'm trying to get in now, and even though the fees seem cheap to me, I'm still at least a year of intensive test prep, study, and a lot of luck away from admissions.
Note, I think there's a reasonably large chance that if I take 4 years off for school that I'll have to take a pay cut when I get back (at least relative to industry norms; pay is going up hard) That's not why I want to go, and I don't think that's really what college is for. It's not a trade school.
>And in light of America's student loan crisis, what politician in his right mind is going to propose subsidizing college education even more? It would be nice, but it is unrealistic.
Because loans on dystopian-fiction terms are a bad idea, and a terrible way to subsidize education.
Education should be subsidized directly, like farming and defense. I like having access to fresh food, no matter what is going on in the world. I like not worrying about being invaded. The government spends my tax money on those things, which is fine. I also like people who have the right to vote in my government to have some rudiments of an education. I mean, if this also means they can earn more money, that's great, but for me? It's mostly the voting thing. The government should directly subsidize schools. Make community college free. why not? the existing payments are mere tokens compared to the real cost. Do something about books for community college, too. Books are cheap in the scheme of things, but expensive for the very poor. They are also something that scales.
I think MOOCs are great for people who like to learn from video, but they aren't college any more than buying and reading books and doing exercises like I've been doing is college. I mean, these activities are great, and are education, but they lack the socialization aspects, and, I guess what the conservatives would call indoctrination. "conventional wisdom" or "common sense" - Honestly, this Einstein guy sounds pretty nuts. should I read him? What about Bohr? he sounds even more nuts.
I mean, I'm several years out, if I keep up my studies, from really having the math to really understand quantum physics. But there are a lot of people who try to apply the concepts therein to philosophy and other things, people who have even less grasp than I do on math.
You could spend lifetimes reading all the crank science out there. A reputable university, and the academic system in general provides you a reasonable framework for deciding if something is worth learning about. I mean, it's not 100%, but if I spent 3 years learning the prerequisites to every crank theory out there, I'd never do anything else.
I suppose a MOOC with sufficient credibility could do that, too, but I think we're a long way from a MOOC having the academic weight of an established university.
Let me tell you, my craft business is booming.
Or let me put it another way. It's like a massive hurricane just ended and you said: "That's fine, that's how it should ideally be. The hurricane lost its energy for some reason that is intrinsic to hurricanes losing their energy."
I hope that this doesn't sound too emotionally charged as I have some very close friends that act robotically to just about everything.
Edit because of HN throttling: I haven't seen unsavory elected folks generate sound policy yet, so I'm sticking to my statement.
As with oil production for example (see 'marginal barrel') people at the end of this tail don't really benefit, but the system in general is still good, most people benefit.
Is the crux of the issue the fact that lower socioeconomic groups are less able to rebound from a financial impact? Or something more specific about targeting lower s.e. groups?
We had these. They were called apprenticeships. [1]
[1] https://www.dol.gov/apprenticeship/
Companies became accustomed to making the rules though labor-wise over the last decade (including externalizing the cost of an employee's education). This is slowly changing due to a tight labor market [2] (forcing employers to finally invest in their workforce) but it will take time.
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-06/it-s-boom...
Apprenticeships tend not to be “short-term”.
I need this printed as a bumper sticker
There are also a lot of really low paid IT jobs that are not officially called internships but that fill that role and hire those people; Before I reached age of majority, I spent a lot of time doing IT work in the neighborhood of minimum wage.
Forking out 10's of thousands of dollars or more in tuition along with all the other life-altering changes required to attend a university for 4 dedicated years is really a poor value for a bit of socialization/networking, IMHO - unless maybe you are at a really elite university.
I think the cost, well, if that is worth it depends largely on what you value and the marginal value of your dollar. I look around my hometown when I visit my parents, not a particularly wealthy place, and I see a lot of those giant trucks, any one of which could have covered four years at a public university.