If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense of offering undergrad education at all.
> Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt
> As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results.
If you have a degree, and are working retail, and are near-poverty, then you screwed up somewhere. Your degree is objectively useless if this is the only prospects available after graduation - so why did you get that degree? Why didn't you continue into postgrad or change degree paths?
Perhaps we should stop offering student loans for useless degrees. Still offer them, but no loans allowed. That would go a long ways towards solving the diagnosed problem.
We've spent decades telling everyone they must get a degree to live a successful life - then we puppy-mill them into garbage/completely-useless degree programs, and are surprised when they go back to the same job they held in highschool. Now, we're going to forgive all those poor choices, because we think we did everyone wrong, but we're going to change not one thing to prevent it from happening again. Brilliant.
I think barring student loans is part of the strategy. Also, focusing on financial literacy prior to high school graduation. If we must have student loans, then colleges need to publish data about graduation rates, job placement rates, etc for a given program, and let lenders determine if loans for that program are a good idea. The whole situation is maddening because there are so many loud voices blaming the literal children who signed for the loans in the first place but (as you say) nobody making any meaningful change to prevent it happening again.
I really wish I could go back in time to slap 18-year-old me before I signed on for student loans, but by the time I understood what I was in for, my options were "take on more loans to pay to finish school and get a high-paying job, or take on jobs that will never pay well enough to pay off this debt". The sunk-cost fallacy is supposed to be a fallacy but perversely, as it pertains to student loans, its the inventive to keep going.
By that I mean eliminating the intermediary and largely useless degrees. You would instead enter into the Condensed Matter Program, which at the end awards a phd, and nothing in between.
This sort of program could still offer minors/concentrations and elective/exploratory classes, but the main degree program would only result in the final destination.
I could be persuaded this is a terrible idea - but the idea here is to eliminate the ability for someone to footgun themselves after dedicating 6-8 years to a degree that ends up being worthless.
The problem is not that people end up with "useless" degrees - it's a rare day indeed that I do something even vaguely related to what I went to school for. The problem is that we as a society are addicted to blaming 18-24 years olds for not being perfect fucking fortune tellers when it comes to choosing a profession for the next 20 years, with an absolute minimum of data or tools to collect or evaluate that data. The problem is that we as a society say "you specialized in creating and operating specialized widget 'A', but while you were studying for that, the market shifted and now we only want specialized widget 'B', and the consequences of that market shift are completely and solely your burden to bear".
All of this to say that no matter how up-front we are about what the end of these long programs is, we are still, STILL asking people to make the right long-term decision, while insisting that they are also too young to rent a car because they won't make the right long-term decisions. "You're too young to buy alcohol, as you might make the wrong decision which could lead to an outcome that will haunt you for decades. Also, pick your career, right now. Delaying this decision will definitely cost you thousands of dollars, waste years of your life, and disrupt your social development (but picking wrong will have the same impacts, but magnified). It may bar you from certain housing situations. No, we won't help you meaningfully engage with the question, or help you understand the right questions to ask. You're an adult now, no one is going to hold your hand, take responsibility for yourself!".
I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20% (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense) across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year)
From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers are doing so because (they believe that) participating in that program gives them advantage in the employment market, some years later... but not exactly to learn anything, which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of those attending.
I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but it seems like the main actual thing the whole system is doing now, whatever anyone's intentions were or are. Only semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career" for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much about whether applicants have a degree.
In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor is too weak, which has led to some really weird outcomes as far as how higher ed is treated.
[EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds with itself than the above contention that increased university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down, while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might be a way to reduce university attendance—so many people are going to college, because companies aren't desperate enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads real money—they can afford to hold out for college grads, even if they don't really need them.
In Australia for example college debt is managed through the taxation system allowing people to invest in the careers in the early days and then pay off their debt when their taxable income reaches a high enough threshold.
The living arrangements are getting more expensive. My college tore down their old, low cost dorms. They replaced them with suites that cost twice as much.
The huge numbers you see tossed around almost always include living expenses. "$120k for a state school!" sort of thing.
The failure in reporting is those living expenses would have been incurred regardless if the person attended university or not.
As a society, I think we need to encourage people to work at least part time, if not full time during university - and take a slower path toward their degree. The result will be more experienced, mature graduates that have had time to evaluate their future.
Also keep in mind the current system incentives - aid is inversely correlated with income and balances are forgiven in some cases. Why work harder if it means getting a worse deal? If one really wants it for "free" then there's always the military route.
It's often thought, incorrectly, that university teaches you how to do a certain job. People go to university to learn how to become an X.
University isn't supposed to teach you how to do a job... it's supposed to teach you how to think critically. Along the way you learn, in varying depth, knowledge about specific fields of study, but that's not the same as learning a job.
Recent graduates are often immature (barely 21, who can blame them), limited in both depth and breadth of knowledge, and inexperienced. Most new hires have to be trained within industry for at least several months if not longer before they become productive for any business/organization.
Having students work part time, or preferably full time jobs while attending university would be a net gain for all of the above.
Working a job teaches teamwork and responsibility. Employees gain life experience, learn skills (learning a skill is the point, not what the skill is), discipline, and how to interact with others professionally and maturely. Basically everything university is not capable of teaching.
Working a job is complementary to an education, under this idea. The notion that university should be completed in four years needs to change - maybe it should take 6-8 years after all. The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased.
"maybe it should take 6-8 years after all."
This has multiple negative economic effects, such as delaying family and decreasing g retirement savings compounding.
"The quality of an average graduate would be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally increased."
I highly doubt this. Without the qualifications to work in their field, they would likely have limited benefit. If they are able to work in their field without the knowledge gained in college, then we should do away with that requirement and move to apprenticeships.
If you are a medical researcher there is a lot of useful research to do. Most subjects are of questionable value. It is unknown if knowing more about how quarks work will ever be useful.
For example, the fields you mention (sciences/engineering, medicine) pull in vastly more money that humanities. Because they have more money, they hire more faculty, and they also train and graduate more PhD students.
I knew a few humanities PhD students while I was in grad school, and none of them were funded by research grants. If they were lucky, they got fellowships. That's a stark contrast to engineering where both grant and fellowship funding was relatively plentiful (though I've got a few horror stories there too).
On top of it, humanities jobs are really hard to find (even more difficult than fields like physics that are already known for multiple postdocs, etc.), making it a bad deal all around for PhD students in those fields.
Overall, I think things are already allocated more or less the way you expect, and I don't think we need to piss on humanities for this. They already have it hard enough.
Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.
You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.
Because learning more about our history and the world we live in furthers humanity in immeasurable ways often only appreciated years and decades in the future.