The new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college.
This is why, when we talk about student loan debt forgiveness, the condescending people who yell "You made a choice! You signed a contract!" are completely missing the reality. Every adult is pressuring these kids to go to college. Their own parents, their school teachers, potential employers, etc. The kids have been lectured practically from birth that they need to prepare to go to college. It's massive social conditioning, almost a religion.
1) Nobody seems to ask the question, why do schools charge the same tuition for every major, even though the schools themselves know that the financial outcomes tend to be dramatically different for those majors?
We might even ask, why do schools offer "useless boutique" majors that aren't financially lucrative? Isn't that educational malpractice?
2) Let me ask you a serious question. I have my own ideas about this, but I want to hear yours without prejudice. Why do you think it is that students choose "a useless boutique major"? And why do you think it is that students choose to go to an expensive private college rather than a state school?
You might claim that these kids are just "dumb", but if you can get admitted to an expensive private college, then you're probably not dumb but rather quite smart. And let's also assume we're talking about "A" students in a "useless boutique major", so kids who apparently quite smart too.
My mom helped to make her program at the school she went to because she was studying thing that were interesting to her. That may not be feasible now and I'm not actually clear on quite how it worked, but I wouldn't say that was educational malpractice.
While I did use the specific skills and knowledge I learned in the process for a couple years, the underlying methodology of discovering needs, aligning interests, convincing others to support you, and developing new ideas and opportunities have been essential - even though I now do something totally unrelated to my degree.
Obviously I was both lucky and atypical, but the "useless vs. useful" distinction is not so black and white. Liberal arts universities _used_ to be about learning how to be a whole person in the world, of which gainful employment is an important part (but not the only goal).
Clearly the aristocratic origins of university education are out of step with the economic realities of today, but the DNA of the approach is arguably even more important to financial outcomes in the long run than just getting a degree in business or STEM.
The world is a mess and defaulting to a cookie cutter degree just because it will get you a vanilla, status-quo job out of the gates is not the kind of thing that will serve most people in the long run (IMHO).
Others may be genuanly interested in philosophy or history or literature or ...
I am thankful for the second kind. Society that has all its culture stored in an LLM is not attractive to me.
- Ideology/institutional pressures/other nonfinancial factors (many of these universities are going bankrupt)
- They want to trap their students in debt forever
- Hoping for bailout from government or private donors
> Why do you think it is that students choose "a useless boutique major"?
My wording was too harsh. Not all non-lucrative majors are useless (though many are). Here are a few reasons:
- Ideology
- Really drawn to a particular field (ex. "starving artist" who doesn't care if they have to eat ramen every day, if that means they can practice their calling)
- Belief in the old ideal of a well-rounded education. Unfortunately, this ideal is getting less and less achievable, as universities become more expensive (explosion in number of administrators) and more ideological, even as the economy. class system is less and less able to support the social classes that traditionally valued this.
Private school vs state school? It would have cost me the same either way. What's the difference then?
BLS has a good start: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/home.htm
As belief in god-kings wained, landed gentry sought to keep their kids from peasant work; kings decree a family was beyond such work was seen as unfair. The church was happy to accept payment for study in theology the illiterate were unable to falsify.
Then came bachelors, masters, PhD, to filter and gatekeep even further.
That’s a paraphrase of various historians perspectives anyway. Depends how reliable one finds them to be, I suppose.
Why don’t they just take their 60k a year tuition and spend it living in the country that actually speaks that language?
I’ve seen third or fourth year students majoring in French with worse language abilities than the engineering students who spent a semester on exchange to France or Switzerland.
Some majors are a complete waste of time and money.
One could argue that learning about 17th century French drama makes this even more of a waste of time and money. Personally I think it's great that society has enough surplus wealth that people with a passion for particular topics can 'waste' their time in this way.
[0]: https://www.ohio.edu/cas/modern-languages/undergraduate/fren...
Are American undergrads studying Tolstoy in Russian in the Russian department?
Webber next considered the impact of a student’s major. If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip.