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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

> Current graduates are simply asking for their compensation to reflect the cost of living in the United States.

If the entire GDP of the USA, after taxes, were simply taken (about $15 trillion) and equally distributed among the ~210 million working age adults of the United States, each would receive about $70,000 a year.

If the 70 million university graduates were each paid a handsome and deserved $150,000 (hey, that $100k's only the start, right?!) that would be about 10 trillion for them, and the remaining 140 million Americans would collectively get about 5 trillion, or an average of about $35,000 each.

America is not actually infinitely wealthy, and a fair and just society requires some hard thought about how ultimately limited wealth gets distributed.

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yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation and they are still responsible for the debt if they are not successful. I don't blame students for being resentful but I think the resentment needs to be directed at the correct source of the problem: higher education, rather than blaming businesses for not paying enough money to pay off a 100K student loan debt. I think it is a tragedy that we live in a society where you are viewed as 'less than' if one does not go to college. This view takes advantage of our emotions and leads some to go to college without a plan and load up on debt without a clear plan on what they will do with their life. Just to be clear, some people should definitely go to college but the current situation kids being told practically from birth (my evidence is the popularity of 529 funds parents/grandparents set up) that they need to attend college is ridiculous.

There's an argument that too many people going to university can destabalise society:

(Economist article)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220713015644/https://www.econo...

Those 529 funds can be used for other forms of education, such as a trade school.

I think the biggest problem is credentialing. Employers want 4 year degrees for just about everything. Many careers/industries could probably switch to 2 year degrees and be fine. I'm sure there are a few that could just do a bootcamp.

All that sort of leads into the secondary problem of debt, with people not considering the cost differences of various schools due to bias, prestige, easy loans (like you mention), whatever. It's still possible to go to the state school I attended and end up with around $85k in debt. Not great, but much better than other schools where tuition alone would surpass that. I feel like this cost difference isn't covered enough in high school, and that students are making emotional decisions about where to go.

Real GDP per capita per year increases over time though, it's not some static number that must take from others for yours to grow, it's perfectly possible to increase the GDP to get your larger salary.

That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't?

> That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't?

Obviously this depends on what you might have done instead… If on the one hand you went to college and learned to program, and on the other hand you didn’t go to college and didn’t learn to program, then you are going to be 100x more productive (as a programmer) having gone to college.

It’s hard to disentangle having gone to college with having learned something there.

I learned plenty of things in college. The real question is how much of it is stuff I actually use today, especially for my job.

Calculus - no, literature - no, Spanish - no, English - no (HS level is sufficient), cryptography - no, networking - no, COBOL - no, assembly - no, business minor classes - barely, all those liberal arts - nope.

And yet, had you not learned to program, a programming job right out of college would have been out of reach.

So it’s possible to learn something at college that makes you 10 times more valuable for a particular job.

I learned how to program in HS. A bootcamp could also teach someone how to program. So could an associates degree. But employers just want the credentials of a BS or MS. For whatever reason, associate degrees are uncommon and looked down upon.

So sure, you could learn something useful in college, but there are more efficient/cheaper ways to do it. A lot of college is waste due to excessive employer demands for credentials and bureaucratic school requirements (liberal arts, foreign languages, etc).

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