College May Not Be Worth It Anymore

The NYTimes republishes a variant of this articles almost every month

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+college+wor...

The usual answer is "it depends"

College is probably a great thing for some people, but it's been oversold. It's not the destination, it's just one way of getting there.

One reason why it's so easy to sell, is that college is a near universal experience for the middle and upper classes, and being an expensive experience, people credit it with much of the personal growth that happens in one's early 20s. They also credit it with making them good at their field.

"I really learned how to think in college"

"I really learned how to be apply myself in college"

"I really learned computer science in college, which wouldn't have happened if I went via some other path.

etc.

It's far too painful for most people to think "I could have been an equally skilled person if I'd spent that time doing something else".

I come from a long line of people who've succeeded without going to college. When I tell people I've known for a while that I dropped out of a community college they usually seem stunned and surprised that someone could actually have a reasonably intelligent conversation with them (and be a decent engineer) without that history.

My experience is that you can read books on the humanities, and CS, and get work done AND not kill yourself in the process. Maybe the road is a little longer in some ways, but you also come out of it without debt, and you get the benefit of having a very different set of formative experiences than your peers.

I assert the expense of college is an awful burden to put on someone who must finance most of it through debt. It's a gamble. You can improve your odds of a happy outcome in that gamble by looking at the Student Loan Default Rate for any given major at any given college, and picking the best program for you (with the lowest default rate possible.)

But if you are a child of parents who can finance your college? Absolutely. No question. This is essentially a way to enforce Aristocracy.

I believe college should be free, and that colleges should limit their number of students in any given program to some sustainable number, where the graduates can actually earn a living.

Not to pick on them, but do we really need this many Art History Majors?

Veterinarian programs specific limit how many students they accept, because if they didn't, their graduates wouldn't be able to afford a living wage. Other majors need to catch on.

And then what if you don't get accepted to a program?

All I've got is Universal Basic Income. And progressive taxes to pay for it all.

Any other thoughts? I welcome honest discussion, because I hope it will inform my views.

The statistics in this opinion piece are cherry picked to hell.

"People who have dropped out of college — about 40 percent of all who attend — earn only a bit more than do people with only a high school education: $38,376 a year versus $35,256."

A small difference between college drop out salary vs high school diploma salary only says that the key is to actually get a degree. half of a degree is worth much less than half of what a full degree is worth. That doesn't say anything about how much a degree is worth really.

"They found that for Americans born into middle-class families, a college degree does appear to be a wise investment. Those in this group who received one earned 162 percent more over their careers than those who didn’t."

Ok great but then they go on: "But for those born into poverty, the results were far less impressive. College graduates born poor earned on average only slightly more than did high school graduates born middle class."

Now they are comparing poor college grads to middle class high school grads. Why not compare to poor high school grads. Poor people may have the choice to go to college or not, but they certainly don't have a choice to be born into the middle class.

"25 percent of college graduates now earn no more than does the average high school graduate." So the bottom quarter of the college grad distribution is lower than the top half of the highschool distribution. This shows the overlap, but again isn't comparing apples to apples. Whats the difference in median incomes?

"Nearly 30 percent of Americans without a high school diploma live in poverty, compared to 5 percent with a college degree, and we infer that this comes from a lack of education. But in 28 other wealthy developed countries, a lack of a high school diploma increases the probability of poverty by less than 5 percent"

For americans they compare poverty rates for highschool grads and college grads. Then for the 28 other countries they compare highschool grads to non highschool grads.

The only stat that actually speaks to the worth of a college degree is that those born into the middle class earn 62% more income if they have a college degree. The rest of the statistics are so inappropriately misrepresented that it seems the author is intentionally being dishonest and the NYT shouldn't publish it, opinion or not.

The issue isn't that college is pointless, it's that tuition is too high and wages too low. You should support politicians with a plan to counter this trend.

Education is important. Raising the overall level of education in this country should be a much larger goal that it seems to be.

speaking as a lead auto mechanic for a chain of shops, please for the love of god quit sending everyone to college. You're making it impossible to find anyone whos worked outside a starbucks.

It takes on average nearly a year for us to do any meaningful hiring. We dont drug test, we dont do a background check in most cases, and we certainly dont care about credit scores. If we did, we wouldnt hire anyone at all. we just watch your work for the first 2-3 months to make sure you're not full of snake oil.

we care about your experience, but we're more than willing to teach. Two of my junior shop techs are changing oil and aligning tires, but before this one of them had a masters in Biology and the other had an anthropology degree. As someone who has always had a tool in hand I cant conceive of whats gone wrong in the college sphere but it terrifies me to think of what drove a woman who once worked on genetics to come work for me.

And for those of you out of college and out of work, please take a look at using your hands. You wouldnt believe how many trades pay close to six figures that are incredibly understaffed. Plumbers, ironworkers, mechanics, maintenance techs, you name it. in most cases a lot of these jobs will pay you to learn the trade. You might not get a cozy office chair, but at the end of the day how many people can say they helped helped build a bridge or fix someones flight home on the week of a big holiday?

This massively misrepresents Tim Bartik's work on the topic. Bartik wrote a long thread here:Check out @TimBartik’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/TimBartik/status/996865804179263489?s=09

The New York Times may not be worth it anymore :-)

It annoys me how they conflate focused learning and investment returns. If they said "Cars may not be worth is anymore" because the best cars are beyond the reach of most people to afford and those people would be better off riding the bus. College is like this in other ways as well, when you don't have a car you are constrained to the jobs you can get that you can ride a bike to or take public transit to. When you don't have that third party accreditation of study in a subject you are constrained to jobs where companies are willing to train you through it. That is great if you didn't want to pay for college, it sucks if they only train you on their stuff, once again limiting your mobility.

College is an option generator. Just like a car is an option generator. More places you can choose to go from where you are. The more options you have, the higher the likelyhood that a good fit between you, your interests, and your life goals will be found.

We have decent data on this, and college is still worth it (for the individual) for all above-average students. Its social returns (which is some of what she's getting at without the vocabulary for it) are near-zero or negative, however, despite the many tropes about "an educated society" to the contrary.

For a much, much deeper discussion of this issue and the factors involved, read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...). It's one of the more careful social science books I've ever read, and while it comes to controversial conclusions, even if you disagree with them you'll learn a lot about the issues by reading it.

Thought experiment: would college be "worth it" if it were free?

That is to say, would it be a valuable use of time and effort?

I am sure there are people who can study hours of literature, philosophy, political science, math and physics on their own. I am sure they would write papers and find others to discuss them.

For the rest of us there is only college.

(You might ask: valuable to what end? Worth what? And that is a good question but the answer is much longer.)

This is a very poor article. College is, on average, worth it [1]. What the article tries to articulate is that we're not seeing a comparable return on investment for students from lower-income families. This is tied to worse graduation rates. As one example, community college students graduate at abysmal rates [2].

This is actually no big secret to schools. There is a big focus on trying to improve retention rates. What might be interesting to the HN crowd is that there are many startups trying to improve the situation in different ways, like using analytics to identify at-risk students earlier [3] or getting students engaged in campus events [4]. It's a tough problem, but colleges are incentivized to fix it - higher retention leads to collecting more tuition.

[1] https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg...

[2] https://nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/SignatureRe...

[3] https://www.civitaslearning.com/

[4] https://www.oohlalamobile.com/

College is usually worth it but needs a reboot for this to really be true now.

Useless and wasteful bureaucracy is responsible for much of the increased expense. Why should students be saddled with years (or decades) of debt to pay for pension seeking, position protecting goof offs to waste time and resources? That makes no sense at all.

Plus the "education" seems to have deviated somewhat into political indoctrination to the point some students come out confusing the two. That doesn't help.

So ya, if colleges would get back to the basics of a sane mandate and operate efficiently it would be fantastic. "Free" college doesn't help because on the current trajectory, the parasitism will expand to slurp up an infinite amount of provided resources, and indoctrination will continue to grow at the expense of education.

I'm not a fan of bootcamps in general, but something along those lines, a group of people fed up with the nonsense and starting over seems could possibly produce credentials that actually had worth other than being a (largely social) signal. And presumably outside the current system these would have to be affordable.

> College graduates born poor earned on average only slightly more than did high school graduates born middle class. And over time, even this small “degree bonus” ebbed away, at least for men: By middle age, male college graduates raised in poverty were earning less than nondegree holders born into the middle class. The scholars conclude, “Individuals from poorer backgrounds may be encountering a glass ceiling that even a bachelor’s degree does not break.”

> The authors don’t speculate as to why this is the case, but it seems that students from poor backgrounds have less access to very high-income jobs in technology, finance and other fields.

Perhaps people born poor demand less money for their labor because if they're making more than their parents ever did they're more content with their current level of pay.

A lot of these problems would go away if we made student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy.

We've created a system that reaps huge profits in encouraging people to go to school, regardless if that's the right place for them.

If there's no counterweight to that profit motive, things will not change.

These articles always land all over the place because the reality is that “college” is a pretty wide term covering everything from a CS degree at MIT (worth millions) to a communications degree from Beaver College (probably not worth much at all).

America needs apprenticeships. E.g. in Czech Republic you can attend these vocational schools instead of high schools and there's less of a stigma to attending them. There are schools for programmers, nurses, car mechanics.

Particularly the programmer ones let you do learn idk, basic networking, 3d programming and some basic entrepreneurship (accounting etc).

I believe it's one of the reasons it has the lowest unemployment rates in EU https://qz.com/index/1046172/this-country-has-the-lowest-une...

Ignoring financial reasons, I think that university is absolutely worth it.

It's 3 or 4 years of your life where you've (often) just left home, it's the first time in your life that you're actually free to do what you want. It's an incredible place to learn about yourself and grow, where the consequences of fucking up usually aren't as severe.

The one advantage college will always have is that it is very difficult otherwise to bring a high number of intelligent people for 3-4 years at the same time and allow them to think freely. This will be difficult to replicate.

Nowadays, in my honest opinion, tuition cost in an institution is not proportional to the "amount" of knowledge that you are getting out of it, but is rather proportional to the statistical chance of you acquiring a life-changing connection that will help you succeed in life - whether that's a chance you start a startup or getting that "dream" job + a statistical chance you will get hired based off of the institution's "brand".

I could be wrong, but my idea is that nowadays - schools are just brands, rather than an educational environments, but there are exceptions of course.

I see a common thread in many of these comments.

It's a recognition that college just happens to be where bright and ambitious young people tend to go after high school. And yes, there's value in the education itself -- but one of the big and lasting benefits is the network of other bright and ambitious young people you meet and form friendships with. I know that was true of my own college experience.

So here's a thought.

Back before the Internet, it was hard for people with similar interests or goals to connect with each other and organize themselves, and so they used this "going to college" experience to help them meet other similarly bright and ambitious people.

But now that we have the Internet, could it be possible to crowdsource that kind of experience without needing to buy into the institutional college experience?

Like, "Let's get together 50 to 100 other like-minded people, all move into the same area, and meet regularly at the library or the coffee shop or whatnot and help each other improve our skills."

There are two ways to interpret that, one way is 'let's not go to college' but the better way to interpret it is 'let's make going to college cheaper (or even free)'.

Brian Caplan's recent book, "The Case Against Education," is relevant here. His basic premise is that college is mostly signaling game that represents a net burden on society. (Ie, the time/resources collectively spent jumping through hoops to get degrees could be put to better use.)

Outside of work, I know a number of folks with degrees from Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara. These folks are not in tech. They love to bust on San Jose State University like its the worst thing ever.

At work, in tech, I know a number of folks with degrees from San Jose State University. They are hard working and successful millionaires.

The folks in the first group would LITERALLY DIE if their kids went to San Jose State University.

It makes me sad/angry for them that they feel there is NO OPTION other than to get their kids into Stanford/Berkeley/Santa Clara at all costs.

I'm almost entirely self taught. Started learning programming on my own on an Amiga 500 when I was 13. Dropped out of high-school since that way of learning did not appeal to me. Never had a lack of job offerings and I now earn the same (or more) than my CS and engineering graduate co-workers. A degree is not what matters, being able to learn and do the job is the important thing. How you gained your knowledge should be irrelevant as long as you do truly have it.

Big surprise: people born rich will have more money no matter if they have college degree or not.

What the article doesn't say is that all other things being equal it is still worth it to have college education. I don't think that the right way to motivate poor people is to tell them that even with degree they might be worse off than the rich. Having a degree will be better for them than not having it. Learning always pays off - be it in college or not.

It's simple, try and get the best education you can for as cheap as possible.

I have not read the article, so forgive me if they state it there, but a large contributor to the problem of "must go to college" are employers.

It's amazing to me that software is the only industry that accepts people for what they can do and have done whereas other industries require explicit requirements.

Yes, training can be expensive, but kids learn so much faster when they care.

Every modern society needs it's signaling mechanic, otherwise it becomes virtually impossible for people to want to take risks, eliminating all ladder access for the underprivileged.

Signals only work if they're hard to fake. The expense of a college degree in both time and dollars perversely increases its utility as a signal.

Of course, the price of a degree can only go so high before before people are unwilling to pay it. But the natural tendency will not be for the price to come back down, but rather for new, more accessible educational options to show up with lower signaling values. It already happened before with the difference between ivy league schools vs the rest and public vs. private.

Society will get even more stratified, with ever finer class distinctions becoming an indelible part of your pedigree. Technology will make it ever easier to buck the trend and become entrepreneurial, but even that will slowly get folded into the system. We see this with how craft brewing ended up getting rolled into the existing system, preserving the lion's share of the profits for the big bottlers.

Ever-decreasing social mobility is the price we pay for advancement.

Just because college may be a great choice for social mobility at the individual level doesn't mean it can scale to everyone. I believe that anyone who gets into Harvard should finance it with as much debt as they like, regardless of their major. It'll be worth it. If you are accepted into a non-competitive-admissions school, you need to make an informed cost-benefit analysis. The relative ubiquity of financing options makes this a bit distorted for an inexperienced young person, effectively lowering the perceived cost. For some reason we believe that lowering the cost function for students will lead to increased demand for college education will lead to increased supply of graduates will lead to... increased supply of good jobs? It's a flawed idea, because it turns out that what really matters, as a young person, is your resume's strength relative to your similarly inexperienced peers, and a mediocre record at a mediocre school is not going to set you apart.

For the longest time, I believed that college was not necessary and wanted to prove a point.

I have done fairly well for myself but I have to admit that life would have been a lot easier with it than without.

After realizing this several years ago, I still did not really attempt to finally go back to school.

The problem now is that college is a market like any other. It's probably close to the housing market around 2007. The cost has increased and the value has somewhat diminished.

I do not have any statistics on the cost of college when adjusted for inflation. There are a lot of other factors that make the cost so restrictive when compared to even 20 years ago.

The education market will need to crash and reset. It's likely that technology will speed this process along. With all that being said, take it from my 30+ years of trying to prove a point, it's worth it.

The myth of the Bill Gates college drop out starting a company like Microsoft is exceedingly rare. As technology becomes more widespread and regulated, the importance of a degree will only grow.

EDIT: formatting

This is a nothing article, the fact that it completely leaves out what degrees are being obtained invalidates it to me. It says that a college graduate makes only ~$3,000 more a year on average than a high school graduate? With how hard they are dissing degrees, I assume they are talking about some worthless degree like liberal arts.

"Why do employers demand a degree for jobs that don’t require them?" > This is a common practice. Speaking from tech industry experience, you'd be hard pressed to find a single job opening that didn't have a degree requirement listed. The kicker? It's not actually a requirement, it's there for formality.

" Technology increased the demand for educated workers, but that demand has been consistently outpaced by the number of people — urged on by everyone from teachers to presidents — prepared to meet it." > If this is referencing the tech industry, then this is an outright false claim. Tech industry job openings to skilled applications is something like 2:1, if not 3:1 right now. Since he just said technology in general, it might not be referencing the tech industry. Talking about the job market in general, I don't have any insight into that.

"The authors don’t speculate as to why this is the case, but it seems that students from poor backgrounds have less access to very high-income jobs in technology, finance and other fields. Class and race surely play a role." > Absolutely false. Race might play a small role depending on the state and environment, but class sure doesn't. No respectable tech employer cares about your financial upbringing, it's about what you have to bring to the table right then and there.

It really all comes down to how you play your cards. If you have the chance to attend college(which not everyone has the chance to do), you have to go with what will open the most doors. You can't expect to spend 2 years getting something like a liberal arts degree and expect to be making 6 figures. You have to research, you have to understand what skills are in demand. I will say that I am biased when writing this. As someone who grew up extremely poor and found opportunity through a tech degree in a local college, I very well have a world of opportunities now because of it. So it is infuriating that the author dares to consider the idea of even community college not being worth it, when it very well is one of the very few doors that leads to bigger and better things for low income people.

I think good colleges are worth it, but mediocre/poor colleges aren’t. Good colleges are where you have high caliber instructors, a qualty network, a good reputation, and good counseling/support system.. ie things that will help you professionally. I’d amso factor in location/climate but not something I’d pay for explicitly

News flash, it hasn't been worth it for at least 15 years. That is when I graduated high-school. I toured some colleges, submitted my FASFA, and ran the numbers. My family was lower middle class. My grades were above average but not top of my class. I had two options: take out loans for college and go into immense debt at age 18 or learn a marketable skill and go to work. I was already self-learning how to code during high school.

I decided to avoid the debt and get to work. Best decision I've ever made. It wasn't always easy but being debt free except for a mortgage that fits my income has provided for a very comfortable life.

If you want to do something with your life that actually requires a college degree, go for it, otherwise learn a trade and live your life without unreasonable debt. During high school every adult in my life told me that I could never make a decent living without a college degree. They were wrong.

College is not worth any more or less than before or after. If you can afford the college and if you want to go to college, college is a great experience. And for another thing, it's a great place for experiencing "pre"-job world. Out of your hometown, there are really various kinds of people from every part of the place. And college is a great place for meeting those people.

Associating with young, ambitious, hard-working people was a really refreshing experience for me. And think about the democracy and the principle of it. There's some amount of truth that more people can think better results. (spare me from the everlasting discussion of populism and totalitarianism) I don't think I learned that much from professors since I didn't go to college that much.. :P But rather, I learned from my peers. And I even learned how to learn from professors from my peers.

Another point: at that age span (of 19 - 23 and upwards), young folks are easy to make mistakes and fall for victims of bad things, be overly confident of their future. Being in a college prevents those unfortunate events from happening to some extent.

And another point: Being young and curious, sometimes you might need to dig deep into your curiosity and study about everything - being in a college means you have lots of free time. So you are in this ivory tower for limited period of time, it's up to you how to use that free (& paid by your parents or you, which means it's not that free at all) time. And since you're still "student", you're immune to many responsibilities also. It's somehow an opportunity for you.

These were the benefits of college in my opinion. Of course, there are lots of cons of college - being too expensive, only delays your chance to be in the real adult world, college has become a school for job market decades ago so why bother, etc.

I think it's one's choice to how to look at this double-edged sword & opportunity that comes once in your lifetime.

Intelligent people otherwise wouldn't be qualified (read: get past the HR drones and other keyword filtering algorithms) without that given piece of paper.

Yes, people that receive bachelor's degrees may be highly effective and talented regardless of having such a degree, but there are few (if any other) means of attracting gainful employment to fully utilize such talents.

College may not reduce inequality via increasing the education level of a given population but it does reduce inequality via providing a mechanism for individuals to signal prospective employers, "here I am." This mechanism, however, is exceedingly expensive but still probably worth it.

Enterprising individuals may however be inclined to "catfish" and outright lie about their education history, as evidenced the other day by the article about one such employer encountering a catfish.

Go to cheap state school and work reasonably diligently. Worth it every time. Private school isn't worth it unless someone other than you (rich parents or scholarship) is paying.

I got a full tuition scholarship at state school, and I'm reaping huge benefits now.

I'm guessing there is a lot of money to be made using moneyball techniques to hire people. There are likely many candidates out there that would excel at professions, but don't have the ability to signal it to employers.

It's only "not worth it" because the whole student loan system has caused the cost of getting an education to skyrocket. Fix the system, take away extreme profits for universities, give everyone who wants it a free college education and it'll be more than worth it again. This would also increase the wealth of the USA by several order of magnitude. Unfortunately, instead of investing in our children and our future, we'd rather put money in the pockets of the rich, as we always do.

>> It shouldn’t here, either: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 20 percent of American jobs actually require a bachelor’s degree.

Ya ... well ... try applying for a job without one. In many fields university education is expected. You can get in on the ground floor as a uneducated kid and rise through the ranks of an organization but you will be locked in. Any job applicant over 30 is expected to either have one or at least have a good excuse for not finishing their degree.

Pieces like this get posted all the time, and the comments are always the same. Folks who don't think college is worthwhile bring anecdotes, while folks who know that college is worthwhile bring facts and data, which show very clearly that the financial returns to education are very real and very substantial. And that's just the financial returns, it doesn't even touch upon the social, personal, etc aspect!

Like any commodity,it's worth what people are willing to pay for it.

If your plan is to start a restaurant chain and get rich then a degree would not be profitable. But if your plan is to make a mediocre salary as an office worker then you need a college degree to make any kind of long term profit.

Not everyone should get a degree just like not everyone should buy a house,get married and have kids. It depends on who you are,your enviornment and priorities.

This article lacks any nuance. College will always be worth it if you have some combination of ambition, capability and intelligence necessary to couple to an industry (or industries) of interest. College was never worth it if you lacked that.

The big change that seems to happening is that a general purpose college education is less and less valuable in the market. This is a result of consolidation and specialization. Years ago, a general purpose degree could land you on the management track at the headquarters of the regional department store; now you need a specialized degree to even interest the recruiter at GlobX in Seattle/SFC/NYC.

The exception of course is: experience. "In God we trust; all others bring data" => "In reputable college degrees we trust; all others bring demonstrable experience". Demonstrable experience for a developer is easy: github.com. It's also easy for lots of other specialties.

A degree provides a claim of capability that varies with the degree provider. Putting [particle simulation code] on github.com (or whichever specialized site) provides a demonstration of capability without regard to degree.

Some employers will require a specialized capability that only a degree can provide (think GAAP accounting, which is insane/brilliant); some will search for the capability itself. It's a shifting continuum and a discussion between you and your kids; to say it's yes/no is to put on blinders in order to ignore a changing world.

Growing up, I was told to go to college if I wanted to earn a good income and provide for a family and it worked out that way for me.

However, when I hire, I never look at education, only work experience. I can't recommend my kids spend $250k or more on college when they could get 4 years of work experience or start a business with a little bit of training.

"The authors (of the study) don’t speculate as to why this is the case"

...but the author of the opinion piece will be happy to.

If I was facing the decision to go to US college, I would be considering alternatives vs. paying full price at an Ivy League school.

Just think what you could do on a fraction of the cost.

- Travel the world

- Take online programming courses i.e. Golang on Udemy

- Use some of the capital to start a small online business

I would then look into taking a software apprenticeship.

Many workplaces require college degrees when they aren't required for any direct reason because it shows the applicant is willing to bend over and take it in the way a good worker should. It's peacock feathers signifying you're willing to fit in.

> What all this suggests is that the college-degree premium may really be a no-college-degree penalty.

The most relevant conclusion here is that. However, I notice this article doesn’t explore the wealth of labor that only needs an associates or trade certification.

Half-assing anything usually isn't worth it. Given that most Americans half-ass their educations, why would we expect doubling down on half-assery to pay dividends?

If working hard towards a degree at a decent school stopped paying dividends, that might be news.

How do you know you live in an SF bubble?

> A third of Americans aged 25-29 have a bachelors degree

I know one persons without a degree.

> earn only a bit more than do people with only a high school education: $38,376 a year versus $35,256

At my company an annual raise of less than $25k is seen as an insult.

If we put aside the financial concerns, which admittedly is a significant factor, what you get out of college is what you want to put into it. If you see it as just a hoop to jump through, then perhaps it's not worth it.

If they just had to rely on the free market, colleges would have closed a long time ago. They can't improve anymore because they don't get any signal they're doing a good job. If I'm doing a good job, I know because people will pay me or I win (cold)battles in war. Instead in these peaceful times, colleges don't have a way of knowing for sure they're doing good, except with self-congratulations and educational theories.

At the same time, I think if it wasn't for State licenses, regulations that force to have a degree and a culture that discriminate against people without a state-supported college degree, we would see no advantages for the college degree holder, at least with current colleges.

I wonder what schools and social strata those who make it as journalists at the New York Times come from. Something tells me an associates from your local community college won't cut it.

I think it's been clear for quite some time that "college for everyone" is not worth it, at all.

Question should be re-framed as, of what is an undergrad degree a "costly and honest signal"?

If you get an education with the sole purpose of generating higher net earnings you deserve to lose money.

For most people it should hopefully be: "I want to be a lawyer, so I go to law school", or "I am interested in engineering so I study engineering" - you study because you need the degree to get the job you want.

Pssst for most careers it hasn't been worth it for 20 years

Clearly the author never went to the University of Miami.

Am I the only person that learned a lot in college lol

I agree college education seems to be getting less and less important. Especially for computer related fields.

But on the contrary, how would it look like if a generation of kids were taught to believe college is useless?

What was your first clue ? Not all college is worth it, most of the degrees are pretty worthless and exist purely because of federal dole.

My college experience was rather disappointing. As someone pressured into going to College (Mom was a school teacher), I gave in and attended a 4 year SUNY University (Oneonta, New York). I knew college wasn't cheap so through high school I worked at a local grocery store making $5.20/hr. (minimum wage) to earn as much as I could, which ended up being around $8,000. Our household income was decent (~$130,000) but my parents made it very clear that all loans will be my responsibility to pay back, I would be getting no assistance from them. Perhaps they felt that I'd be more likely to graduate given the risk.

I've always had a strong interest in computer art (3d modeling / animation, video games, special effects) and SUNY Oneonta was one of the few schools at the time that offered a program in that field (without leaving New York). In my free time through high school I would dabble in Photoshop, 3DS Max, Maya, etc. I wouldn't say that I ever became exceptionally good, but my interests continued to grow. I was genuinely excited for college.

The first thing I learned was wow, college is way more expensive than I imagined! Students were required to live on campus, pay for the maximum meal plan, unable to have a car for the first two years (relied heavily on public transportation), cost of books, cost of art/class supplies, cost of food / grocery items. With a full course load, finding the time to work a part time job felt impossible. I spent most of my free time on school work and staying up very late some nights working on large art assignments - painting, drawing, mixed media, ceramics and so on. The first two years of college were mostly "core" classes, meaning I wasn't able to take classes pertaining to my major (computer art) until I've completed them. It was high school all over again, almost identical classes.

Finally, 2 years down, 2 to go and I was excited to finally take some computer art courses. I quickly signed up for 3d modeling, animation, web design, anything I could get my hands on. Almost immediately, I was disappointed. The courses being taught were below my current knowledge level (even advanced courses). For example, the web design courses were still entirely using tables for layout with Photoshop "slices" when the rest of the world was primarily using divs/css. Everything was very outdated brief overviews of the basics. I couldn't believe that such basic courses would result in me obtaining a major in this field? It also made me feel inadequate when preparing to find a job after school.

It was about this time that I took on an internship at a local web design/development company (of about 5 people). My interests quickly changed from Computer Art to Web Development. I really enjoyed building websites, working with customers and trying new things. After my internship ended I was hired by this company for $15/hr, which sounded really great out of school. Not long after, the management eventually began struggling with finances and I left that company, taking a graphic designer position to keep money in my account. College ended and my total debt was ~$77,000, ouch...

Six months pass since graduating and my student loans are now coming in, ~$1,200 a month was my starting payment. I was making $14.86/hr. and life was really hard. I did everything I could do to reduce my payments which eventually dropped to ~$700 / month, but with rent, vehicle expenses, health insurance, food, etc, I was missing payments and defaulted on one of my loans. My credit was destroyed, I was living check to check (barely)... I resented college.

Today, I am in my early 30's working as a Software Developer. My credit is slowly repairing (just bought a house last year!) and I am making triple my old salary. I wish that I had more time in college to truly learn what I wanted to do and explore a bit more instead of taking the "core" classes the first two years re-learning "western civilization" and "earth science". If I could go back in time I'd get a proper Computer Science degree, instead of being a Software Developer with a Bachelors of Arts. I know the position I have now would not have been offered to me if I didn't have a college degree (CEO is very fond of college graduates), but it certainly came at a cost... I have two young kids now and I often wonder, will I also recommend they go to college?

School is a waste of time and resources for the talented these days. You can learn anything you want online by the best people.

It's becoming training for state-run communism. No choice, only negative reward signals, march at the same speed as the average.

Of course if we tell people the truth - your outcome can essentially be predicted by measuring IQ, which stabilizes around age 7. SAT score is essentially a makeshift game-able IQ test, like our interview processes.

The whole system is based on falsities. You can't make people smarter. You can only confuse and unforgivably indebt them. Like several of my friends who 'failed out' of engineering. It's so incredibly damaging and places debt and blame on the individual, even 10 years later some of my close friends have not recovered financially or emotionally. It's like if your best friend focused on playing professional basketball, encouraged by peers and parents, and nobody bothered to mention to him that he's 5'1".

I think, they were late with that realisation for like 10 years.

The article takes an exclusively financial look at 'worth it' and completely ignores both education and human connection as an aspect of going to college. I get that the author is writing about money and money alone, but the headline is deceptive.

Additionally, I do understand that a lot of people go to college for the purposes of getting a job. But that's not all college is, and pretending that the only reason anyone values college is the salary level afterwords is missing the most interesting pieces of the discussion. Things like,

-the arts are important for a society regardless of the financial profit from it (i.e., it would be 'worth it' to a society to not force each individual person to earn a living wage for their whole working life).

-college as a mechanism for meeting people, making connections, and learning about the world. Yes, some college experiences can be closed-minded, but that is not the norm.

-many other things. This author is so focused on money, they are missing the forest for the trees.

I have a masters degree in Computer science and it really helps me every day as a Wordpress Administrator.