Americans' confidence in higher education has taken a nosedive
lithub.com
lithub.com
The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
Confidence in higher education to do what?
Also I'm honestly not sure I really care/put any weight into the opinions of random adults whose opinions of higher education are basically a reflection of how universities are portrayed to them in their news bubble. The fact that political affiliation not only matters but matters a great deal means it has little to do with the institutions themselves. I bet you could get the same results with "confidence in science" which is just as vague and nonsensical.
An open question would also be the overall shift (if any) in international enrollment. If international enrollment has stayed the same (or even increased) then it means the decline in American enrollment could be even more extreme. By contrast if international enrollment has completely plummeted, it could go some way towards mitigating these numbers.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Population_Pyramid.sv...
How much confidence do you have in yourself?
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
[2] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...
I don't think any institution can maintain the confidence of the general public without being scrupulously neutral on controversial things (or at least scrupulously respectful of all common perspectives) and staying focused on widely-shared values.
A far better approach would be in trying to test for a specific hypothesis, e.g. "I believe confidence in higher ed is falling due to XYZ" reasons.
But, in the context of Gallup, I think this kind of research is really there not to answer questions, but to provide a sort of pre-signal to aide in hypothesis generation. Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
Gallup does good work, but this kind of omnibus question is not really meant to answer any questions.
Source: I work in B2B survey and interview research.
...so it sounds like it's a product of our current higher education then.
I would particularly like to see questions about "higher education" binned by field. I hypothesize that sentiment will differ most strongly between STEM and "X studies" fields, with the classic liberal arts subjects (English, history, etc) somewhere in the middle. I'd also be curious to know what the public knows about "the reproducibility crisis" or administrative bloat, if anything. And it would be fascinating to ask those with and without degrees, across 2-3 generations.
It would also be very interesting to me to map this against what people's perceptions were for graduation rates, scholarship availability, average student debt, and even the perceived impact that a school's endowment had on education quality.
There's a lot to know, but seeing the very basic trend exists means that there is something to look at.
edit to add: if you looked at 40 years of this question, you would definitely want to control for the higher number of people with direct exposure to the higher ed system, since that base rate has been on a positive trend for a long time.
Source: someone with a marginalized viewpoint and the target of "scientific" and institutionalized race-based discrimination.
> "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?"
Confidence in higher education doing what? Leading to a good job? Making people better? Having a positive ROI? Being fun?
Gallup asks "how much confidence do you have in X", for business, government, courts, gods, etc. to measure sentiment. It's too generic to be meaningful. The trend, though, is interesting.
Related, but longitidunal studies have indicated that people's stated goal of college has changed quite a bit over time. 40 years ago it was much more common to see the answer of "to develop a philosophy of life" where now the more common answer is "to get a good job."
It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.
The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.
Although what the word "confidence" means here is a baffler. It is beyond vague.
Not sure I believe this. What's the source of this statistic?
According to Ipsos and Reuters about a third of Trump voters have a college degree or better. Pew has an more detailed analysis of voters for the 2016. 2018, and 2020 elections here [1], including education, which seems to confirm this.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/in-changing-...
Pew also has a more up-to-date analysis of partisanship and education here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship...
They do say that there's a relatively recent shift in voters who went to college towards the Democratic party.
The Republican Party now holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.
By comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education.
This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree.
It’s sad that as an electorate, as a people, (even the democrats), show a lowering of “confidence” in higher ed. It means experts and scientists get ridiculed. It’s disgusting and sad.
Is this a harbinger of a failing empire? I think so.
Given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged.
Then there was the "trust the science" fiasco around covid.
Trust is like glass - easy to break, and very hard to restore.
doesn't mean there isn't a lot of local fraud. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind.
Let's not forget that fraudulent Alzheimer's paper that misdirected Alzheimer's research for decades.
The Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fraud?
Does it matter if most come from foreign scientists, when prestigious journals publish them? What are we supposed to do, reject papers with foreign sounding names? Why aren't the journals doing proper vetting?
Attempts to suppress any counterclaims to the official scientific opinions during covid would make anyone skeptical.
Then there's this:
https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/the-misrepresentation-of-oak...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-do...
One should be careful about statistics reported by an entity that has a strong self-interest in the outcomes.
* A single horrible murder took place decades ago * A second (possibly less terrible) manslaughter case that took place in the 1980s * A variety of violent acts in dangerous areas in developing countries, today
I’m not even going to dispute that there is academic fraud. Just that your examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is when one filters for reputable researchers, journals and institutions, and also takes into account the denominator (which is enormous) rather than highlighting some spectacular examples and making broad claims about the world falling apart.
I've also seen articles (didn't keep cites) about the "replication crisis" of large numbers of research papers with results that nobody can replicate.
> making broad claims about the world falling apart
More like claims of losing trust in "trust us, because we're scientists!"
If there isn't good evidence to show that most science is good, the best we can probably claim is that we don't know.
With respect to your question: “is there evidence that most science is good”, I’m not even sure how you would answer that question. All I know is that if you compare the world of my grandmother to the world of today, the two are so different as to be unrecognizable, and scientific advances are responsible for most of the difference. That progress continues every single day, and we’re both alive because of science was at least good enough to make our continued existence possible.
>I’m not even sure how you would answer the question.
It should probably be answered in the same way we’d answer the converse. Something like “here is the data and the tests that show the data quality is high and the results are replicable.” My point was, if you can’t show that, then the claims that the work is good may not be scientifically valid.
To put a finer point on it, we know there is replicability crisis in many corners of science. But we don’t likely know how much of that is due to bad science or outright fraud unless we do the science-y work to check. And unfortunately many of the incentives are aligned against that very thing.
The post I responded to said: “given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged.” I picked a bone with that given the total lack of evidence for the claim. More generally I have a problem with a broader class of people who make claims like this, since I find these claims unlikely and unjustified.
You came back to me with a different question: “how do we know that all science is good?” I genuinely don’t know how to answer that question. And bluntly, I think it would be incredibly hard to answer it: the question is up there with “how many grains of sand are there on the world’s beaches.” I do think that clearly science, in whatever state it is in, has historically worked amazingly well. The world we live in is a testament to that. Maybe the answer is that it doesn’t matter, that ecience has always been mediocre and yet we go to space and cure diseases with even low-quality science.
A more general answer is that everyone doing science is working incredibly hard to find the answers to hard questions. We are always doing so imperfectly, with imperfect methods and imperfect tools and imperfect brains and yet we soldier on. If you want to join this effort, either to further it or bring evidence to criticize and improve it, we are all excited to have you. But simply posing impossible-to-answer questions is not necessarily doing either thing.
I think this is too romantic of a view. Yes, some (or even many) are working hard to answer hard questions. Others are seeking money, status and/or prestige as their top priority, just like practically any other field. It’s no different than saying financiers are working incredibly hard to create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It makes for a lofty narrative, but it’s also ignoring much of human nature.
And if you think that question is impossible to answer, it should at the very least give you pause to think about the confidence you have in your conclusion. Otherwise it reads as “I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” That’s dogma, not science.
But so what? What’s most interesting about the conversation we’re having is that even as folks make and fall back from specific arguments, the directional nature of the discussion doesn’t shift. All this tells me is that you don’t like scientists and are eager to land a punch against them, even if the punch is as weak as “they’re human.” This kind of conversation doesn’t have much value to me, since I can’t learn anything from it except that you have some strong emotions. But maybe it could be valuable to you?
I think you’re extrapolating too much. Again, you’re making a strong claim based on limited evidence which is the hallmark of bad reasoning. I work in research and publish/referee articles regularly. I have no qualms with scientists, but I’m also acutely aware of how the system is flawed.
>I think the first claim is made without evidence
I get the impression you’re too riled to actually see my point so I’ll be explicit. We have lots of evidence that bad science is pretty widespread, especially in certain disciplines. We also have anecdotal examples of fraud. The latter is a subset of the former, with the remainder being good work. How big of a subset is it? Your claim is that it's small; my claim is we don't know.
There’s no goalpost shifting. All of the points made are related to the issue of fraud. Asking for evidence of your claim is not goalpost shifting, nor is understanding that fraud is a consequence of human incentives for status that exist in practically every domain. I simply made the point that we know there’s a problem, but likely don’t know the extent of it. Meanwhile, you made the claim that academic fraud is rare. And yet you also claim it’s impossible to prove that it’s not rare. It’s pretty clear that you’re not making a reasoned argument, which is the irony of someone defending the current state of science.
I read back through my posts to find the claim I made that you’re talking about and I can’t find it. Please let me know what you’re talking about, maybe quote it. I’m gathering this has mostly become a troll at this point, and I’m sorry I kept responding.
>examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is
Given the fraud and replicability issues that have been shown to exist even within the most reputable institutions and journals, I think this claim needs some substance to back it up.
>this has mostly become a troll at this point
Please review the HN guidelines. They specifically reference assuming good faith and avoiding shallow dismissals. I’ve tried giving that to you by asking questions and giving you multiple opportunities to give evidence to your position.
1. The initial post made a strong claim about high levels of fraud. 2. I asked for evidence to support this. The evidence given was arguably very sparse.
The quote you shared is from my response to point (2). Arguably in a world of infinite pedantry it could have been phrased differently. For example: “given how relatively rate cases of fraud supported by actual evidence are” might have been clearer. However given the context I assumed that claims of scientific fraud would involve evidence.
This seemed a good place to end the conversation. Yet:
3. You came in and “judo flipped” the conversation to “aha; but what about the fraud that could theoretically exist but that somehow had produced no evidence of its existence. Perhaps these levels are very high!” 4. I said that evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove, given that it would require resources beyond those we currently spend on science to identify this. 5. And moreover I pointed out that we have never had the means to detect this evidence-non-producing fraud and yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits that we experience on a daily basis.
And thus this leaves us at an impasse. All science may be full of fraud and bad results that we cannot detect. Perhaps it always had been! And yet this has not prevented science from producing results that are enormously valuable. I am left with some questions:
1. What strategy would you pursue to answer your extremely difficult question, given that real-world resources are extremely finite. Please do not say “well, we just need to replicate every result” becayse this simply misunderstands the point about resources. 2. If we cannot devise a feasible policy to test your “perhaps science is full of fraud” question, what should we do instead? Is there an actionable policy you’d pursue?
My view is that strong answers to both questions are not so much interesting to me, but interesting in terms of whether your world-view has value. Surprise me!
The other commenter did provide some evidence (albeit anectodal) of obvious fraud. In the context of non-replicable studies, it can be as high as 2/3rds are shown to be non-reproducable in some domains. This includes some of the highest quality journals and institutions. There's quite a bit of evidence of this. Now I'm not claiming that is all fraud, but I am claiming we don't know how much of the problem is fraud.
>evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove
I disagree. I'm taking the point that it's not hard to prove, but rather the incentives are aligned against it. If data and methods are truly open-sourced, much of this can be proven. But there is little status or money to be gained from reproducing work, leading to a situation where we have a system where it is rarely done.
>yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits
I don't disagree, but I think you're are misinterpreting my position. I said the system is flawed, not that it's worthless. Put differently, it still produces good science but it's hard to separate the good science from the bad. The signal-to-noise ratio is potentially low, and the rate of publication exacerbates this. I would argue that boosting the signal-to-noise ratio by weeding out bad science could produce much more benefit because less time is wasted chasing trails of bad science.
>What strategy would you pursue
You keep framing this as some impossible scenario. I'm saying it only appears that way within the context of the current incentive struture. So my goal would be to create a change to that incentive structure. This is off the top of my head, so don't take it too seriously but here's what I would try:
1) We need to change the way academics are measured. Currently, it's a "publish or perish" paradigm that puts a premium on novelty and essentially disregards most everything else. There is also a glut of PhDs; far too many given the number of tenured academic position. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on a PhD to produce publications and this can manifest itself in pushing bad science. There's two things we could do to help this:
1.(a) Provide an incentive where reproducing research is valuable. Currently, researchers don't want to spend time reproducing studies because there's very little upside. They won't generally get published so it doesn't help their career. I would say we need to start giving more status to reproduction studies. Probably not as much as more "novel" studies, but there should be an avenue to publish them. Maybe a two-tiered journal structure where we have *Nature* and *Nature:reproductions*, where the latter is used to publish works that re-create the studies in the first. Metrics like citeScore could be weighted so that the novel studies give you a higher metric than the reproductions, but you still get some credit for either.
1.(b) Provide a pathway to also publish "non surprising" studies. In the current structure, research is more prioritized if it produces surprising results. Thus, if a researcher produces work that is unsurprising, they tend to just throw it out and try something else. This can lead to wasted effort when another researcher ends up doing the same thing. We should create an avenue to also publish "unsurprising" results. This has already started to get applied in some domains, like economics.
2. Right now, publications can hide their data. I think there should be a cultural shift where the highest quality journals make sharing the data and code a mandatory requirement. This ties directly in to facilitating the replicability as well as allowing others to look at your methods and see if there's any wonkiness going on (whether fraud or otherwise). Some of the issues of fraud that we've seen are because researchers couldn't hide their data because it came from a third party (eg, Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino were outted because their data was owned by an insurance company that was willing provide insight into the raw data).
3. Journals should set aside a portion of fees to fund replication. As it stands, journals get free labor from referees. I would argue this should be balanced by having some money set aside to fund a process aimed at replicating some of the studies in journal. It's wild to me that we have a system where a referee is expected to work for free and also to pay for a subscription to the journal they are helping.
Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
You forgot lobbying.
Are scientists working for the government free from incentives to push bad science?
Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit.
The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.
[1] - https://www.gallup.com/175307/gallup-poll-social-series-meth...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.
I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.
System seems screwed up.
Top 10 colleges are a completely different game. Nobody needs to go to a top 10 university.
It’s a game for the most competitive to play. It’s not equivalent to higher education in general.
Most young folks can study something that interests them, at little risk. No one here has to worry about the ROI of their offspring's studies, nor do they have to worry about their prepubescent child starting charities (or whatever other insane nonsense) in order to qualify for some insanely expensive elitist college.
Seems like a much more sensible approach than putting a fuckton of pressure on kids in order to get them in a college which will land them with 30 years of debt on top of a potential degree.
Let kids be kids, and give students a chance to learn and explore.
Source? Costs decrease, too.
There are MANY underrated good state schools that are nowhere near top 50, but can still offer a great education.
Unless your only measure of success is getting your foot into the workplace due to prestige.
Prestige I'm not so worried about the but getting foot into the workplace is a significant benefit.
It was a big manufacturing company that happened to have a small software division lol. I earned $60k in a HCOL state but that’s OK. You learn quickly when you’re a junior, and if you job hop a few times, it’s easy to land at a respectable software company after 4-5 years.
I now work at an employer that is a household name, and hires new grad computer science students from stanford, MIT, etc. Those new grads are a little smarter than me, but we still work at the same place. It’s OK…i’m not complaining. :)
But, you're talking about a collection of institutions that receive tens of thousands of applications every year. Just by pure numbers, it's clear that only a small percentage can attend.
And the fact that only a few can attend feeds their air of exclusivity, which makes their attendees stand out in the job market, which then causes more people to want to attend those schools.
I don't know if there's a way to solve this except by forcing people to stop caring about what school a job applicant went to. Which is kind of starting to happen but, in many industries like law and business it's still the norm.
Societal problem, really.
But the advantage of hiring from one of those schools ends there. For every "top 10 university" student there are 10 more capable ones from another school, you just have to work a tiny bit harder to find them.
So ultimately it's lazy hiring.
I'm sure it depends on your field: in mine (academic science, which is as plagued by name-dropping and elitism as any) the thing that matters is the last thing you did.
Of course the whole thing is a trajectory. If your goal is to climb the ivory tower (it probably shouldn't be but anyway...) you need to be lucky or rich at some point. But if it doesn't happen at at undergraduate admissions you just have to do actual work, and then get lucky at some later point. So yes, it's screwed up. But that's not my question.
What I want to know: how often are people getting hired based on their undergraduate institution beyond their first job out of collage. Is this a thing? In what field?
I think it's possible to find a path through most universities that will produce a first class education. Take the most challenging classes available.
I won't make my kid kill themselves to get into a top 10, but only people who haven't gotten the glow of a top university think it doesn't matter.
I went this route, and am now a tenured PI at one of the most prestigious places in the world. I had several highly cited first author pubs in good journals as an undergrad at a state school. I was also paid to do that research, which made college almost free. I’m not going to put any pressure on my kid to “prepare for college” because it simply isn’t necessary and just makes you miss out on being a teenager.
The sad truth is parents think putting massive pressure on their kids will make them smarter, or more skilled at things that lead to a high paying or prestigious career. Unfortunately that’s not true… if they have the aptitude to succeed they will do so without the pressure. If the pressure makes the difference, it means a miserable life doing something they don’t really like and aren’t very good at but were forced into by their parents.
The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.
I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.
6.5 / 8 / 9 according to their own website
These are about the same as when I was in school during the great financial crisis
I have/had loans from 2.5-6.5
20 years ago the base rate for any debt was cheaper than it is right now.
What anyone has to decide is whether they are willing to take on debt at today's rates. You weigh the pros and cons and decide for yourself.
Personally I wouldn't have gone to college if I had to take on debt to do it. That was my choice though, and it was only right for me in my situation.
More information: https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-interest-rate
they aren't "tricked". They saw the last generation's results of going to college, without thinking for themselves and making a better decision.
Truly, the children are to blame.
They are adults choosing their life's course. They are not children. They have responsibility to think for themselves, and to accept the consequences of their choices.
college debt is crushing because they chose to have it. They could've gotten into apprenticeships instead, or a community college which costs less.
There are opportunities in high school to discover whether studying higher education is for them. The parents also have a role to play here - paying for extracirricular activities to test out or discover their child's talents and interests (which, of course, is only affordable for the wealthier parents - a form of inequality of opportunity, and have nothing to do with blinding going to college at any cost).
So no, i do not agree that the "children" are not to blame.
so, i dont agree that just because they're 17 that they're not capable of making decisions that require planning, gathering information and rational thought. It's just that a lot of them aren't doing it, and play the victim when the inevitable results aren't desirable.
They cannot point to their parent's generation and say "i did what they did, why don't i get the same outcomes".
That is where entire school system should take people. Give them tools to make at least someway reasoned decisions. If they love something, they can do it, but know that there might not be greatest financial rewards involved.
I don’t feel bad for the current kids or anyone who grew up with the internet because they know better. If you have an internet connection and didn’t research loans before taking them out then that’s on you. The new gen or the iPhone generation as I call them are much smarter than us because they see most millennials got a useless degree and work somewhere unrelated. Which is why they don’t listen to us but I don’t blame them. Good on them.
What made me think I needed to go to school was the constant inundation from counselors and teachers that my options were college or a mcjob. To a kid that just wakes up one day every late summer and walks into a new classroom without doing anything to make it happen, it seems like college is just the next high school. It's just what you do. Nobody, ever, not once, talked to me about the financial aspect of it. Lucky for me I didn't wind up going beyond a month at a community college which I quit for other reasons, but without those reasons I'd have continued with it because I, like most people my age, didn't know what to do with myself. I had a rough time after that for a few years, but today I can say that I am financially and in general living a much better life than my peers who went to college, and I have a few that also didn't go and several of them are doing wildly better than me. I don't know a single person that went that isn't stuck on a treadmill trying to play it safe and pay down debt. That's their lives, they'll get old on that treadmill, and mine is mine alone.
Long story short, yes, from my observation, most people are tricked. The only people that need to be going to college are people who want to be in medicine, lawyers, people that want to go into academics and do research as a career, and people who's families can afford to give them a liberal arts education just for the sake of it. The rest of us are better served just starting to live our lives.
When I was in this position, it was basically only economical to go a private school for undergrad.
> Also most private school aid packages are very good, if you are poor you will probably get a full ride at a school like American or GW.
entirely orthogonal point - this equally applies to any poor student, doesn't matter that you live in DC. anyone who wants to go to a public school has access to this
There are exceptions like the people with useless $200K degrees working at coffee shops, but you have to ignore a lot of common sense to get that far. For most people, college really does have a positive ROI.
And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.
How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
Real income to GDP ratio has been stagnant by some degrees but in this case, we're only looking at average IQ on a normal distribution, average as in 85-115 (or whatever the official range is), assuming that's what you mean by 'spectrum'. e.g. for the average {IQ} or whatever metric you meant in a person, he/she will earn more compared to the same person ceteris paribus, but without a university education.
People over time is the only reasonably reliable measure we have. And the data is clear: Statistically, people did not start earning more when they started attaining college degrees.
I know people without degrees that earn much more than those with degrees.
I don’t think development is so difficult where it takes 4 years straight to learn.
They haven't; real incomes and the spread of real incomes have both increased over time. (That is, both median real income and the ratio between any given higher-than-median percentile and the median has increased over time.)
> A person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
It is tautological that people on the same place on the income spectrum earn the same regardles of other factors, but having a degree has a substantial effect on where you are on that spectrum.
If you are talking about something else, it would probably help to more clearly articulate your meaning.
This does not seem to be the case, at least not when observed over long enough time periods to filter out the noise. Looking at the earliest income records we seem to have, incomes were on par with what we find today. Wages have increased, which is perhaps what you meant, largely because they are a comparatively recent invention and had nowhere to go but up. Of course, now that most incomes are derived as wages, wages have reached the point of stagnation as well.
> having a degree has a substantial effect on where you are on that spectrum.
The spectrum is that of humans, not of income. Clearly someone with, say, down syndrome is not the same as someone without. To think that people are all the same is erroneous. Indeed, someone who has down syndrome is statistically unlikely to succeed in college and, likewise, statistically unlikely to do well in the broad economy. –– That does not imply that attaining the college degree they lack will cure what ails them.
> If you are talking about something else, it would probably help to more clearly articulate your meaning.
Help in what way? I understand what I am articulating. If you are, perhaps, implying that someone else might not understand, that is certainly possible but affects me not. There would be no logical reason to seek to improve clarity in the case.
Sure, but I was talking about Canada, the "most educated nation" according to the OECD, which, importantly, crossed the 50% attainment threshold a long time ago. The USA only did so recently.
In the interest of fairness, it might be too early to see the big jump we're told to expect in the US data. I am a little surprised you reached for it for that reason. If we're not too early, then I am still surprised you reached for said data. The data shows a fairly consistent growth trend over the span of decades, with no instantaneous growth of any substantial amount to account for the point where the degree was obtained. Perhaps you mistakenly linked to the wrong datasets?
That said, it is telling that US median income has risen – quite significantly, really – even while the median income did not possess a degree. Which, frankly, echoes that the relationship trying to be painted earlier isn't actually there. While we can try to be fair, you and I both know there won't be a big jump in the median income to account for the US median income finally attaining a degree. The idea that a degree would provide increased earnings doesn't even make sense.
What does exist is college filtering mechanisms (entrance requirements, academic rigour, etc.), which have traditionally kept out those who aren't destined to earn much in life, but that, again, doesn't mean attaining a college degree is a cure for what ails them. Indeed, in a given cohort, it is statistically likely that top performers who succeed in everything they do in life will also succeed in college and in the economy in general. But what does that tell us? Don't be born into life problems? Not exactly actionable.
I agree that the topic of education is much more nuanced. There are obvious factors such as the types of degrees, their utilization, and ultimate productivity that need to be taken into account. Less obviously, there are factors like the changing composition of national production it's relative specialization with respect to the global economy. Please make it necessary to evaluate the impact of Education against a counterfactual where education is held constant at a national level.
Similarly, I would argue that the education to outcome statistics that are often trotted out are misleading due to uncontrolled confounders and intrinsic differences in the groups that go on to receive various levels of Education. That is to say, there are likely many differences between the average person that gets a post-secondary degree and one who does not complete Primary School besides their educational attainment.
When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character.
I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.
I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps.
It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning).
In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting.
When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional.
Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.
The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.
I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.
I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.
I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
I think you're missing a big factor, rising admin spend [1].
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
If you set these factors aside, there is no reason people couldn't get a legitimate bachelors for a few thousand dollars a year.
you could literally run an engineering program using class recordings from MIT and Stanford out of a community center like AA meetings.
> Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat...
I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out.
I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself.
I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.
I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
...And many go on to become teachers and textbook writers thus perpetuating the problem for students who absorb information differently to the way they do.
We need multiple approaches to teaching, unfortunately they're not seen as conducive with efficiency, minimizing syllabus material, keeping teachers' numbers to a minimum, etc. (See my comment to the same post.)
I think this is true with many people, myself included with some subjects (or certain topics within subjects).
That said, with some topics I found the subject matter sufficiently stimulating in and of itself to hold my complete interest and attention. For example, I immediately grasped the fundamentals of calculus and understood why it is so important.
I cannot say the same about linear algebra and matrices which I was taught before knowing why they are so important in physics and elsewhere. Frankly, back then I found it to be boring, tedious stuff. Now I'm aware of its proper context and use my attitude towards the subject has reversed completely.
Same when it came to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in physics, they were a bore and a pain (I was much more interested in electrodynamics and such). Similarly, my attitude to thermodynamics has changed completely, I'd now argue that thermodynamics is one of the most important (and fundamental) parts of physics. Had I been taught why thermodynamics is so important and given interesting instances I'm sure my attitude would have been very different.
Also, I was never much good at learning foreign languages, I recall whilst still at school doing my homework. I'd lie on my bed and bash my head against my French textbook whingeing to myself and asking why the hell am I learning this damned stuff. That attitude changed completely when I went to live in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language.
In some ways I've envied those students in my class who could suck up information like a sponge and regurgitate it verbatim during examinations. That said, I had no trouble equalling and often bettering them in topics that held my intersest. More to the fact my fundamental understanding of the subject was often much stronger.
You're right, teaching subject matter to students that's seemingly irrelevant for them at the time it's taught, is, in my opinion not only counterproductive and often a waste of time but also it's likely to turn potentially good students away from the subject altogether.
From my experience, when teaching a subject including context and relevance is just about as important as the subject matter itself. The trouble is that the people who set the syllabuses and write textbooks are so often the very same people who were good at regurgitating stuff verbatim in exams. They become teachers because of said skill and they never fully understand that many students simply don't learn in the same way that they do.
Anecdote: It was difficult for me to learn algebra at first because things like the phrase "plug it in" (wrt variables) were never defined, only demonstrated. They expected students to simply infer by watching and following along. But once I finally figured out the fundamentals, I could use them to engineer my own solutions that rivaled what they wanted to teach me, and at that point I instantly got bored with most of the lessons (and went from hating math to loving it). At points they had to ban me from using calculators, mandate me showing all work, etc. because they realized I was being far more efficient than they wanted. That's when I really got upset about it.
See, the mistake they made is assuming that I didn't need a fundamental understanding in order to simply regurgitate the subject material. They expected me to learn purely by example and then work purely based on their algorithm. They did not expect me to require complete base knowledge, and once I had that knowledge they did not expect me to use it to engineer my own solutions. That was their second mistake; assuming that I would learn and apply only what they were trying to teach me.
My personal hypothesis is that school wasn't designed with autistics in mind. Learning by following along without explanation is traditionally a neurotypical thing. Autistics often learn based on rules and in fact don't always benefit from merely following along if they can't infer the actual reason behind something. I'm sure a lack of attention to this detail is a huge reason why autistics are often viewed as having "special" needs rather than simply different ones.
Right. I don't consider myself expert in how people learn stuff or acquire knowledge but speaking for myself I'll almost certainly remember it if I understand it.
A slight qualification though, there are many 'minor' facts that I've understood at the time but have eventually forgotten or I've only partially remembered them. This is especially so if I hold little interest in the subject. (It's known the mind clears dross out if it isn't reinforced or used.)
What I'm talking about are key concepts or processes in a subject that one is expected to know and retain. For me, I'll much better understand a topic if it's taught in context (why we should learn it) and or if it's of interest to me.
Here's another example from math: at school I recall learning parametric equations and I quickly caught on and understood them because I'd come to the conclusion that they are a really neat and cleaver way of solving stuff that would otherwise be difficult. Here, the learning reinforcement was of my own doing—not because the teacher has stressed this part of the syllabus more than any other part. The info stuck immediately because I could visualize how useful they were.
Absolutely. I agree, and I think this is also the case for myself. Context is very important to me, and it sucks that it's often completely left out. Often, when I ask "why?", I'm treated as if I'm completely refusing the subject.
People act this way outside of school, too (for example, I'm often treated this way at work), so I think it's just a neurotypical thing that I'm expected to do what I'm told without question, even if the question is curiosity / confusion.
Exactly! :-)
This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media.
There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2]
I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines.
[1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
[2]https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-...
Not sure, but it does seem like a way to make people reliant on your political party.
Instead of funding universities and managing them like we should be, we handed them over to MBAs who seem to charge more and more every year for the same degree.
Obviously federally-guaranteed loans are an idiotic solution to a self-inflicted problem.
I've never pushed my child towards College.
Like I tell people, I don’t think you need 4 years to learn basic things like html, css and some JavaScript.
I meant Professional STATE LICENSED Engineer.
Anyone can be a programmer (aka "engineer"), and some are even good at it. ;-)
I do have a masters degree in computer science (software engineering specialization) and since I'm working as a contractor from the start nobody ever saw it or wanted to see it.
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
It's cruel and immoral and must change.
That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid.
Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that.
Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1].
I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years.
They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived).
[1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...
University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not.
They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential.
I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.
The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable?
It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down:
> 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse.
Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring.
Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not?
It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.
The article is merely self-referential.
Those who can't afford it won't indulge.
Those who can, will, because IYKYK.
I will say that I have never experienced any ideological purity tests that conservatives are constantly complaining about. Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.
The second you step outside of the stem bubble into liberal arts courses, it's like woke everything
Now I will say, there's good woke and bad woke.
I had one class that was about sociology and demography of the US-Mexico border. The professor was very respectful, etc etc. Seemed like useful history lessons for someone about to move to California or the southwest
I had another that was about the pre-kantian post-scholastic era of western philosophy, the professor didn't actually try to teach, showed up late, when she did show up it was some lecture about feminism. Left a permanent bad taste in my mouth
Soon, LSAT and others to follow.
It is like the state no longer demanding an occupational license, leaving consumers rudderless in getting quality workman.
I for one will only be checkibg for medical degrees that have SAT and MCAT admission in force policy. This act only disservice those hardworking and legitimate grads.
https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-d...
AI is going to do to most subjects what calculators did to arithmetic, and desktop publishing did to cursive writing. Is anyone learning their times tables and calligraphy today for everyday use?
Sadly, star trek had it right — once you’re hooked up to the borg hive mind with neuralink, it’s not even clear what any individual has to add to “the collective”.
Change my mind!
Or in 30 years: “Change our mind”
It’s the same thing as the job application problem. When it is as easy as having a form autofilled and hitting submit (even if there is a moderate fee), you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Obviously top rated stuff has high demand and low supply. Further if students are finding lower rank universities less worth the money, many of them would try even harder to get in higher ranked ones.
That's correct and to some extent it's had a deleterious effect on education. The primary problem however is that money—the finances of education—has become as important or even more so than education itself. 50 years ago education had more intrinsic worth that it does today. Well, anyway, it did with those who controlled the politics and thus the pursestrings.
When employing my trade-learnt skills I apply myself in a quite different manner to that when I'm working in my more formalized profession, and in some ways I've found that way of working more enjoyable. Achieving or creating things with one's hands can be most satisfying.
About 40 years ago trade-based skills such as woodworking, metalwork, tooling, crafts, etc. that employed a large percentage of the workforce fell out of favor and that a career that required a college/university education was seen to be more financially rewarding. This resulted in a huge increase in the numbers who attended college/university.
Leaving aside politics, I think it's time to reappraise our educational needs, and we should stop looking down upon jobs that involve manual work/dexterity as we've done in the recent past. Moreover, we shouldn't forget that until the age of high tech and automation most work was of a manual dexterous nature and productively therefrom provided most of our needs. Not all but much of that is still relevant.
I know what I'm saying flies in the face of modern automation, computerization and smart working, etc. And I acknowledge that my view is counterintuitive given current trends in today's world.
Nevertheless, from what I've observed, many, many people don't want or have need to know the intricate workings of advanced engineering and technology, or unfathomable facts about the physical world such as why α is ≈1/137. I'd thus suggest that in many instances a university education has not necessarily been the best fit or outcome for many people.
Perhaps it's only now that many are beginning to realize the benefits of acquiring an advanced education are just not worth the time and effort not to mention its inordinately high cost. And to some extent we now may be seeing a reversal of the problem we had before the current trend of seeing a college education as a necessity—that's where many who were suited to a college education were unable to receive one through lack of finances and such.
Little doubt the picture is more complex than I've painted it. Irrespective, I'm not for a moment arguing or agreeing that we should dumb down education in any way. In fact I'd argue the opposite, which is that we need to better educate and train people in ways that most suit both their abilities and personal traits/personalities so they lead more fruitful lives.
Furthermore, I'd argue that as a society we need a better understanding of both the educational needs of individuals and those required by society for it to function properly, and that this is urgent because of major changes and developments in manufacturing, with the impact of AI and other significant changes within society. These changes are already having a profound impact on what people do and how they go about doing it. It's all the more urgent we address these issues now because change is occurring with ever-increasing rapidity.
I'll finish by saying that for the benefit of both those who are being educated and of society generally we must dispel the somewhat elitist notion that's often seen in academia and by many employers that those who work in the trades are doing low and menial work and that they are so employed because they are either incapable of more advanced academic work or are otherwise unsuited for it.
Such notions aren't helpful for many reasons but the most obvious one is that they skew the numbers of those who go into trades and professions and the impact of this skewing is negative. Also, it's important to stress that many trades require considerable training as well as the development of excellent skills together with lots of experience, especially so if they are to be performed well. Essentially, much work that's now deemed as trades-based is far from being menial.
Next, some of the smartest people I know work in the trades and I'd put them up against many who've more formal qualifications. Also, from my observation, many of the people who I've encountered who are happiest and live the most contented lives are trades people.