Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.
That would be the definition of alienation for me.
For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well
Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.
And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.
A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.
Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
Higher ed unfortunately almost desocializes a lot of people. They live in a bubble and become insufferable obsessed with politics and social issues that are disruptive and inappropriate in the workplace
And people don’t want “job training,” people want to be educated and have a fulfilling life.
Of course college looks too expensive if it is just “job training.” But that is not what college is.
College proved its immense value first, and then because of its obvious value, employers started looking for it. But you’ve let the cart get in front of the horse, by thinking that the value of a college education is simply that employers are looking for it.
If people were genuinely pursuing college for self betterment, then you'd think the numbers would have been dramatically higher in the past, especially back in the day when you could comfortably afford college even on just a part time job. The increase in enrollment also came right alongside sharp increases in cost.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
My issue is these things boil down to class. There should be a legitimate, high quality alternative for those who can’t afford it.
One of the most disappointing things about college was how little people cared about the liberal arts aspect, where humanities courses were an annoying box to tick.
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.
Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).
Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).
Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.
I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.
Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
Because the history I know has it being 99% created by men with engineering skills doing paid work for large corporations.
The uni I went to did, in multiple classes, to the point where you could almost predict the "war story" you were about to be told :D
I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.
The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.
Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.
(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
This has a lot to do with what a country wants. Many countries show this is possible; the USA prefers a profit-based system where everyone pays a lot.
It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside.
Eventually you have a hollow tree.
I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.
Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
Maybe the study tracks of those going to the industry and those pursuing a scientific career could split earlier. OTOH I personally must say that what I've studied for my master's degree, and even what I researched during my further postgrad studies (even though I did not ultimately go for a PhD) ended up being rather useful for my work in the industry.
It wasn't a sufficient job training though; I sometimes think that nothing is, nothing short of an actual job.
I’ve studied at university, state college and community college and my best history teacher was at a community college.
University is expensive probably because there is job demand but almost no real downward pressure to keep it cheap. Students can’t provide much pressure and it’s not directly affecting companies that ask for it. A lot of families also carry this “prestige” element that pushes the cost up.
It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
During my bachelor degree the average exam had a 30% failure rate and the first semester exams almost 55%. If you fail an exam three times in a row, you're not even allowed to shop around universities, because you're banned from studying that degree for life. Instead, you're forced to find a similar degree that doesn't have course overlap on the exams you failed, which means you can only transfer some of your credits to the new degree. It's do or die.
The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s, which is why this development has gotten increasingly aggresive in the last few decades. You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way. The EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed. It's a neoliberal dream, where the amount of regulation can only go down, and public funds are allocated to private companies more and more.
This is especially true for universities, where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.
Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.
From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
Community college to state school path.
You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.
And that's before any scholarships or grants.
Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.
Even though the end result is exactly the same.
Whether that is a sensible strategy for the firm (a candidate bias towards those who can pay the top college fees) is another question.
A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.
I mean, good luck finding a job in the US when your degree is not from the us (or maybe Canada). Most industries don't hire folks with overseas degrees.
And is this about the content of the degree(s), or just brand name recognition?
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."
Which, honestly, isn't that bad of an idea. Means-testing for everyone.
There are still affordable schools. And staying in a dorm with expensive room and board remains optional at many institutions. Heck, some people still live with their parents.
The state school I went to is still just around $10k/year tuition, and I got a broad education that opened many doors for me. (I was in the humanities, but there are very good science programs there as well.)
Of course it's crazy to sink $400k into a degree for most people. And for many, many people, it is completely un-necessary! You can still get a relatively affordable 4 year degree.
So I'd say we have to consider the full set of drivers that can correlate: overall rising cost of living making it very expensive to be at a university full-time, general labor market sentiment which is mostly down since covid, interest rates and debt risk which are still high despite recent cuts, etc.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...
People do the math and think, "I don't want to spend $40,000 on this. I can get a decent job without spending that, and then I can buy a car, too."
Politically and economically, it's incredibly dangerous for universities to keep going down this path. When the common citizen finds low value in a particularly expensive-to-run government institution, they elect lawmakers who dispose of those institutions.
As a society, we need to highly value widely-obtainable post-secondary education, from the citizens to the President. Or we're doomed.
This is one of those things that may technically be correct, but only because colleges are giving out tiny $500/yr scholarships to practically everyone.
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.
And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.
For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.
For just one slice of education, to start.
As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.
Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.
While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.
If you're a kid and you want to be making money (or at least a comfortable living) in 20 year's time, become a farrier.
Because we are going to be ploughing with horses again soon, the way things are going. And even if we're not, a horse needs shod every couple of months and costs a couple of hundred every time.
I've never seen a hungry-looking farrier or scrap metal dealer.
I know a farrier. The pay comes straight out of your body and cannot be called comfortable.
Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.
They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.
A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.
If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.
Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.
I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.
Yes, and it is also demonstrated by the Flynn Effect. [1]
About "A Case Against Education": Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society’s top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability.
Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.
My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.
I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up, and if you don't have one, then in all likelihood, you will struggle to not be downwardly mobile, as it's the new middle class gatekeeping tool.
People should NOT listen to anyone over 45-50 or so who tells them college isn't necessary. Those people grew up in a world that no longer exists.
Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
And that is the point: do the math that assesses the incomes correctly and many people won’t see as college as sensible for those professions.
If I were faced with spending $100k/yr for my kid to go to college, I would strongly consider offering 5 tranches of $50,000 that we would together invest in business ideas over the next 5 years. Humanities and social sciences could be learned in parallel, while trying to launch businesses that bring value to the world.
The lessons learned would not be the same as those one learns in college, and the social aspects would be very different/lacking. This would clearly not work for all teenagers, but for some, it could be a much better opportunity and use of funds.
Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?
I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...
College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.
The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.
I would not assume earning that much for 43 years.
So yeah the numbers are not the most rational. $60k would be more reasonable for a college grad.
When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.
I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).
Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.
Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.
The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
elite schools aren't only desirable because they set you up with big opportunities. they are the way for high-school overachievers to signal to everybody how smart and good they are.
elite schools could probably make bank if they just sold a stamp-of-approval from their admissions committees that just said "you are smart enough to get admitted, but were not lucky enough to win the lottery of being given a seat".
I believe the primary reason is to attain credentials in pursuit of access to more lucrative employment prospects. I think your 1 and 2 are both significant factors, but they are quite far behind the pursuit of credentials.
In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.
If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.
If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?
If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...
Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed.
No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein...
So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.
>Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications?
This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
That's not to say other personalities are less worthwhile... It's just that we have emphasized one kind of personality as the ultimate one and then are surprised that -- after maxing out opportunities for those already suited towards that personality -- a saturation point is reached and future effort has marginal gains.
So you just need to sort of move wealth around such that it is less egregiously unequal. Oh, and states can fund universities like they did a few decades ago. :) Win-win! Poorer people get to participate more freely in society, with more opportunities, and you don't have to print any extra money.
Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there.
I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.
It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.
As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.
Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
1. Someone to write lesson plans for you
2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process
This is trivially false outside of some math, CS and sweng. Even within IT learning networking at an above basic level requires a well equipped lab.
It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).
When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.
Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
Yes it is. "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions. It means "at no cost to the student".
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
That's why there's a harpist in the hall in fancy hospitals in the US and not at Necker in Paris, or why the administration at universities in the US is multiple times the size you'll see in France. Market shaping incentives.
It wasn’t, other people paid for it.
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing.
We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
So now, almost all white collar jobs require a degree. You may not ever be able to move into management without one either.
I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere.
As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions.
I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.
Employers probably decided to avoid them.
That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.
EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.
The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.
Yes.
The Ivy grads are often considered over-qualified (rightly or wrongly). Especially for government positions that don’t normally hire elite school grads and smallish local/regional businesses.
I know plenty of people who work in different government positions (federal, state, local) who will not hire grads from an elite schools (Ivy, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) because they think something must be wrong with them (“why would they apply for this job?”), or they think that the applicant will jump ship at the first opportunity.
I agree that those can both be issues, but I’m not sure those issues are limited to or are more likely in elite school grads.
I’ve certainly seen situations in which elite school grads have worked at an org that didn’t normally hire any of them, and the quality and quantity of work produced caused there to be some tough conversations in terms of standards and evaluations (they basically “crushed the curve”). In the two cases I’m most familiar with, the people in question were relatively non-ambitious female employees who just cranked out high quality work. They took those jobs because they were decent jobs near their respective families. In both cases, the companies had bittersweet feelings when said employees left —- they lost productivity, but they no longer had the manage outlier performers.
One of these ladies left her job to become a stay at home mom. The other joined a more prestigious privately-held company who seemed to know how to harness her abilities (she moved up quickly).
So… it happens.
But there's enough SM comments to make a guess.
My impression is, unless you can get into a top X college, it isn't worth it.
This also depends on the cost of course. My university in Thailand back then was 1,000 USD per year, so that seems worth it, even tho it isn't in the top 20.
If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.
opening lyrics of first song
I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
From what was described to me, and I trust this person to not misrepresent their experience, was that they were essentially told 'hi, cis white male, sit down and don't say a damn thing, this isn't your place to talk'. And then go on to essentially present a curriculum that was essentially a myriad of thinly-veiled misandry, compounded by extremely clear classroom rules/culture where any opposition was decidedly unwanted by the lecturers.
I'm the first to champion equal rights and equal opportunity, but that that sort of thing was going on in higher ed left a bad taste in my mouth.
By the end of the class I had softened on my stance a bit (though still an atheist), and I saw multiple Christians get up, walk out of the class mid-lecture and never come back. Not all of them mind you, but a few of them took such great offense at the class even mentioning other religions that they left, and some really couldn't handle any sort of debate or discussion.
Which university, which year was this, what was your major, and what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
No. The university added other "studies" courses to my requirements that contributed to my decision. After taking gender studies, I knew I could not tolerate the other "studies" courses the university was suddenly demanding—which were not required when I first started.
> Which university
The University of Utah
> which year was this
2014
> what was your major
Computer Science
> what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.
> And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?
One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.
In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.
My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me over these elementary facts. They made it quite clear that the only acceptable narrative was that, because he "identifies" as a woman, he is a woman.
This is just one example of the kind of "thinking" that went on in this course. I don't like it when I'm told what I must think. As I said before, that's indoctrination, not education.
> I have a hard time believing this story.
Why? It's all true.
If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
> If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
I was in a class like this at an elite school 3 decades ago. I was told by two other students that my role as a cis straight white male was to say nothing or validate what others said.
This was during a time that the core concepts of what is currently called DEI were being fleshed out.
My “sin” was asking whether certain research and data were being reported and represented accurately (they weren’t). The creative interpretations led to policy suggestions that were about 180 degrees from what the author intended. How did I know that? I knew the researcher and had discussed it with him directly.
That class was an absolute circle jerk, and it’s the kind of circle jerk that gives progressives a very bad name while being completely unnecessary (i.e., many parts of the progressive agenda have plenty of solid research support without wildly creative interpretations).
Anyway, the professor in this class was having none of it. He appreciated my questions. That said, half the class thought I was satan incarnate.
Edit to add: Also, you failed to learn the lesson that you can't always quit in the face of tyranny. Did you never have a history or civics class in high school?
Thiel and his ilk are eager to shove the US back into feudalism, with themselves at the top like some kind of warmed-over Borgia family. An educated populace that is capable of operating a democracy competently is absolutely intolerable for them.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now
Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.
I've certainly seen YouGov surveys asking if I'd ever visited (IIRC) some tiny town in Alaska, presumably to weed out people who just say "yes" to everything. Recent quiz question from Tom Scott's Lateral podcast was along the same lines but for being qualified to pilot a military submarine.
A lot of people would likely have been better off going to a trade school or going into a trade apprenticeship.
Parents should focus on helping their kids figure out what they want to do and developing a path to achieve it. The path may take them to university, a trade, or something else.
Look forward to an article like this about every economic sector every few months
we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf
It’s not just about learning skills, but it’s a natural and rational mechanism to filter talents.
White rich people hated competition from poor and brown people. That whole even playfield thing was their nightmare.
Ask the rich families if college degrees are still important. You’ll get a different answer.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.