> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities?
To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.
To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
Can everyone get into those schools?
Obviously not everyone can get into every school. But overall enrollment volume across every institution is down, which means being a top X% student will get you into progressively better schools unless they cut overall class sizes. Obviously it’s the institutions at the bottom of the list which lose students first, which is the “problem” highlighted by this article.
The reality is that the economy cannot occupy all these specialists and still requires a ton of fungible generalists. In fact we made so many specialists that themselves became fungible. Look at the tech layoffs, they casually throw under the bus industry legends, simply because everyone has become nearly replaceable.
And even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
What is that based on? I haven't heard of any such problem, other than from people who are trying to cut education funding or social mobility.
> and still requires a ton of fungible generalists.
Undergraduate college degree holders are generalists. Nobody considers you a specialist, or will hire you as such, because of your undergraduate degree. Maybe some engineering degrees, but really you need a masters degree for almost every specialist job.
> even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
Despite the recent reactionary backlash, we still far ahead of where we were 50 years ago and even more ahead of where we were a century ago. The evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.
Check any South/Eastern European country. Tons of degrees, insanely high youth unemployment. Devastating lack of labor for businesses. Of course an engineer will prefer to stay home with their parents instead of going to work as a barista.
> Undergraduate college degree holders are generalists. Nobody considers you a specialist, or will hire you as such, because of your undergraduate degree. Maybe some engineering degrees, but really you need a masters degree for almost every specialist job.
With generalists I meant unspecialized labor: servers, farm workers, construction workers etc
I thought we were talking about the US - note the headline. I understand some less wealthy countries have that problem; I don't know why but it's an interesting question.
College is great but 1) Not for everybody and 2) only the rich can pay 50K-400K to "sharpen their minds" without a high-paying job in the other end.
We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
You cannot. Very few people - geniuses - could learn on their own what a typical person learns with a teacher, and even the geniuses are far better off with a teacher working at their level.
> 1) Not for everybody
That's such a general statement that it's meaningless, not falsifiable. It's for most people.
> only the rich can pay 50K-400K
Yes, I strongly agree that's an enormous problem.
> We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
That's what the people who want to cut opportunity and education say. But middle-class / poor people have dreams and want to fulfill their potential too, and are also an enormous pool of talent.
The solution is to make college affordable. Multiple presidential candidates have offered ways to do it. There's no reason we can't.
For most people, yes. For our elites, I think one of the great losses over the past generations has been this financialisation of education. Measuring ROI solely in monetary terms, thereby sacrificing the civic and cultural parts for that which is easily measured and marketed.
Growing as a person and intellectually is a great opportunity, a lifelong change. Better than some immediate cash in an entry-level job.
The library doesn't even approximate a substitute. Maybe you are a genius, but almost everyone needs teachers. Even experts need people to teach them new things, to mentor them, etc. They also need labs and equipment.
Also, the library you need for real reasearch is not free. It only exists in academia. Your local public library doesn't give you access to nearly the same resources, nor the essential reference librarians. (Maybe the NY Public Library? Does that have JSTOR, for example?)
Libgen is a solution to that.
I agree there is value to learning with experts but not at the cost we are expected to pay these days. The labs and equipment are a tiny fraction of the tuition a student pays and many disciplines do not require anymore more than pen and paper and the aforementioned resources. Why should a math and economics major pay the same as a biochem student? Because the majority of the cost is the bureaucracy and the fancy real estate investments.