- Housing - Education - Healthcare

If costs are too high for students to afford, why doesn’t the price fall? If it’s scarce why isn’t more of it produced?

Given the cost of education in the US, the value of college is questionable indeed.

I guess I just like simple language.

Is this a problem for society?

No, it isn't. A tight labor market which provides more opportunities for on-the-job training is positive for everybody except those who made their money selling fake tickets.

I made the mistake of thinking that the purpose was to get what is essentially a certificate stating that you went to a good school and got good grades.

I do think it was a net positive overall, but in reality I think I would've done just the same by going to school and networking, partying my ass off for 4 years, and then figuring it out after.

If you can do those things without going to college then it's a no brainer _not_ to go.

It can't be both ways. Unless of course you're the Higher Edu Industrial Complex and you know NPR and their ilk have no memory and no integrity.

Yes, there's some concern. There always is. But that doesn't make shamelessly crafting two opposing narratives.

However, Chinese graduates are in a similar situation as US college graduates.

It's hard to find a decent job with a college degree. The college degree was once the premium but now more like a baseline in many industrials. Now China wants to push more young men to go to the professional education track.

But the challenge is there are more issues in professional education than in college education here.

This is probably because the tuition fees have become so inflated that most people cannot recuperate the costs during their working career.

Whether this is good or bad is still an open question. I'd claim that we have too many college-degree professionals and that companies claim they need them, when they really don't.

This is likely some combination of Covid making college temporarily less attractive (the social connections are just as important as the education) and lower-income students who have families that need them during the pandemic (community college enrollment dropped by a higher 13%).

I would expect enrollment (at least at 4-year universities) to fully recover once the pandemic is well and truly over.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...

Whatever is causing this, it's ok part of a much bigger trend than can be explained by COVID, which has exacerbated but not caused this trend.

If the mantra is that everyone should go to university, then it becomes an extension of high school, and the credentials less valuable... and mostly the student loan industry thrives.

I presume there are cheap colleges and universities in the states as well that are just as educational as the big name schools.

  according to Hege Ferguson, director of admissions for Florida State University, as of January 7, 2022, they have received 67,291 first-year applications for summer and fall semesters. That is a 21.2% increase compared to January 7, 2021, when they had received 55,500 applications.

This is BAD. NEWS. for us Americans. How are we supposed to compete on an international scale if we are not training the next generation of knowledge workers[0]?

Part of the thing I always hated about Uni is that it felt very... kamikaze. You have one shot. I had to work during the day and go to school at night and going an extra year was NOT an option for me. It sucked to be on the hook for so much money when society didn't really make any room for me to actually learn and excel in that environment.

I suppose you could join the military. However, the military isn't for everyone. I don't know if would have had the mental fortitude to make it. Also, you lose out on some extremely productive years.

I know a lot of ex-soldiers who have severe disabilities, both mental and physical, from their time in training / on the field. Also, forcing everyone who wants to go into higher education into a propaganda mill isn't exactly a great idea either.

Also, the military doesn't just give you a credit card to go to any school you want. I had friends in school who struggled with the gi-bill system.

0: A term I an loathe to use, because I do not think other work is "dumb work", but it is a useful short-hand for workers who are working in jobs that require advanced education.

Zero undergraduates in 2065. You heard it here first! /j

- Depending on what you choose it might not even be rewarding

- You'll be saddled with crippling debt forever

Nah.

You're better off paying a couple of thousand for a coding bootcamp and have a better chance of finding some work and actually pay off the smaller debt you might have incurred.

It will help those who choose college, too - as demand for education falls, so will the prices.

It used to be common for selective colleges to administer their own proprietary admission exams. But that was a huge burden on students applying to multiple schools, hence the switch to standardized testing.

The same goes for infant mortality. People cite infant mortality as evidence that our healthcare system sucks. But really infant mortality is clustered in certain sub populations.

The same goes for murder rates and gun violence.

Unfortunately the problems cannot be fixed until people admit and are willing to talk about the underlying actual root causes.

Brian can't be bothered to enroll into college because he's tired of remote learning.

Yes, remote learning sucks. Doesn't mean you should stop. I'm bothered by this optionality. Later in life you're going to do a lot of things that suck, but have to do anyway. Further, at such young age, I would expect some hawkish parent to "help out" with the choice, but I guess I'm old fashioned.

Fine, though. Delaying enrollment whilst earning some cash in the meanwhile is not the end of the world. And so Brian starts work at Jimmy's sandwiches.

Then comes his mastermind move: he starts work at an Amazon warehouse for slightly more pay, yet needs to buy a car to get there. For which he takes a loan.

I imagine many Americans don't even blink at this, but it's absolutely moronic. The very point of the break from school was to earn cash. Instead of saving it up, he's now in debt for the car, works a shit job, and comes short both for his "needs" and for college.

Brian seems to have some self awareness at this point:

"It's so hard," he says. "I'm just like, 'Wow, if I go to school, I'm going to take time off and I'm not going to have any money for things I need.'"

Yeah, Brian, Wow indeed. Typical for American consumer culture: spending above your means from the very start.

What we need is a better life for the working class, not more college. Start by getting serious about wage and hour laws, and start throwing employers in jail.

It is criminal what they have done to people. Absolutely criminal.

My biggest gripe is the astronomical cost and debt burden that has vastly outpaced inflation. The university system in the U.S. has been taken hostage by greedy interests that push all kinds of bullshit costs on to students and have lost sight of exactly why the university exists in the first place - to educate. Not to house, not to entertain, not to keep fit, but to educate those that want to learn. If universities would stop with the non-sense "campus life" and focus more on a their core mission (like universities in Germany, for example) they might not have ended up in this predictable mess.

This level of enrollment decline only means one thing for universities: Layoffs and shrinking budgets. You can't squeeze any more blood out of these students.

There are plenty of adjunct professors who don't earn much. Why don't they join forces and create their own university?

If they focus on education and limit spending on administration and sports, they could offer high quality, affordable education.

That being said, both of my daughter's had drilled into their heads how expensive college would be by their HS teachers and staff. We're continually telling them not to worry about it, it's our responsibility to pay, not theirs, don't feel bad for not going into STEM, etc. Doesn't help that we live out west where anti-intellectualism is the default and a degree is just seen as a piece of paper.

As far as I'm concerned, besides the fields that deal with the fate of a person's life (like doctors and lawyers), the whole idea of going to college and getting a masters in whatever your heart's desire deserves to be imploded. I see no sense in those saying that we need to "fix universities". Honestly, fuck universities for acting they're worth as much as they are while still pretending their priority is the students. Everything I learned in college and the different schools I went to can now be learned online or at the library for free or for $29.99. In a few generations, universities will be naturally replaced with more practical alternatives. So why try to prop up these archaic institutions for the sake of the average person rather than the exceptional? Such a desire is more of a fetish for an image of what universities represent.

If college is important factor in improving economic outcomes, it shouldn't matter if you go to college at 18 or take a few years go at the age of 21 or even later in life. We have this stigma around adults who get a college degree later in life. I've met a several people who went to college as older adults (one at the age of 26 and the other at the age of 30) and ended up having highly lucrative careers. My mom got her masters at the age 55 (and rightfully lorded over my sister and I that if she get her degree with straight A while holding down a job, being a mom and in her 50s, then we have no excuses).

I believe college is valuable (though greatly overpriced in the US) but you don't need to be a young adult to attend. In terms of the labor effect of having fewer college graduates available for the labor market, honestly most jobs don't really require a college degree (including office and white collar jobs). Employers tend to use college degrees as cheap filtering signal instead having better hiring processes. Most entry level jobs have onboarding and training where college knowledge is not a perquisite for success.

On top of that, for certain professions, what is taught in colleges is an absolute joke. Computer science at my college had zero connection to what happens in the real world and I'm being completely honest when I tell you I can't think of a single thing I learned in college that I use in the real world. Even some of the more advanced types/concepts would be better taught in a ~1hr tutorial or video than how it was taught in my college.

I'm all for giving people a broad education (I think I liked my non-technical/math/science classes more than the ones pertaining to the major I was working towards) and I think college should do a better job preparing people for the "real world" (budgeting, meal planning, conflict resolution, etc - So should high schools).

I dropped out my junior year after being frustrated at feeling like I was wasting my time in classes that didn't prepare me. It was one the best decision I've ever made. I still got saddled with 3 years of debt but better than 4 and having no advantage at the end of it. I've never had an issue finding a job over the past decade+ and I'm making very good money (more than people I know who did graduate).

We need massive college reform in this country.

In the linked PDF, they note they don't have complete data on international students. "In recent years, IPEDS enrollments in the nonresident alien category have accounted for nearly five percent of all IPEDS enrollments."

   Fall 2017 Fall 2018 Fall 2019 Fall 2020 Fall 2021
  All Sectors -1.0% -1.7% -1.3% -2.5% -2.7%
  Public 2-year -1.7% -3.2% -1.4% -10.1% -3.4%
  Public 4-year -0.2% 0.0% -1.2% 0.2% -3.0%
  Private nonprofit 4-year -0.4% 2.4% -0.6% -0.1% -1.6%
  Private for-profit 4-year -7.1% -15.1% -2.1% 5.3% -9.3%

The article itself posits that it is tangentially related to costs as kids are choosing to work rather than pay for school. However, that association feels pretty shaky and doesn't hold up to scrutiny as to why these changes accelerated so rapidly during the pandemic.

I don't have a data-driven answer, either. However, my guess would be that students are uninterested in an online college experience and don't see the value in spending to attend a lucrative school so that they can then sit at home on their laptop. If I had to bet I would guess that enrollment ticks back once all these restrictions are abandoned.

Everyone is vaccinated, everyone is boosted, everyone wears their little masks, and they're still going remote, quarantining, and forbidding students from doing pretty much anything except sit in their dorms and watch remote teaching material.

Is it any wonder that a lot of students walk away? Everything that makes college fun is forbidden. Why the hell would you put up with that? If I want to sit in my room, not party, and watch education videos all day, why would I pay $50k for the privilege?

This is bullshit, and students aren't idiots, which is why a lot of them are dropping out and postponing their education until universities get their shit together.

"it could be there are fewer people and thus students, due to population growth slowing or reversing, or it could be it's unaffordable or unpromising?".

I hope it's from slowed population growth, but suppose it's the cost.

There's few private colleges (mostly international business schools I guess?), a large majority of students goes to the public universities. The eduction is free, but you pay a few hundred Euros per semester in administrative charges, which usually includes a ticket for city or state public transport.

You can get a loan from the state (BAföG) to cover living expenses, which you will pay back after finishing, when you have a job (well of course things are more complicated, but that's the gist). The maximum amount you have to pay back is 10.000 Euros, even if the size of the loan was larger.

My middle daughter wants to study art (she is an artist and sees a future in it for herself). My benefits will expire by the time she applies to college. So she’s not likely to end up at a four year university.

I have a hunch my youngest daughter may want to study computer science. Unless the cost of school changes I may put together a program for her myself mixed with online schools and traditional CS resources.

Obama explains it the best. (Ignore the right wing title its a good video of him on his first visit to Kenya)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fItxli7-uU0

Starts at 15:13

These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace.

[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

The onus for training needs to be put on the businesses themselves. This is better for everyone including the businesses themselves. Putting in training requirements and a probationary period where new hires have to meet a certain threshold or be let go. The individual can then decide how best to learn.

The ROI for many degrees is abysmal. There's been some really great research on in this area, including my favorite report here: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7583742/

The worst cases from that data approach -$1M ROI. Ouch. Those institutions deserve to be held to account, they are doing a disservice to their students and society for putting people into such economic peril. The term leach seems to apply. I'll even concede that prescribing classical liberal education for all is somewhat paternalistic, even overly anglo-centric. We can do better. Still, I think education is critical for democracy to be functional and as a society its worth investing in.

We're generally on the same page as far as I can tell. But yes, I will become quite cranky if you call journalism useless :)

It's not true.

That does not lessen the impact of 3000 deaths among people who did not take on that risk.

I'd rather live with ineffective American lockdowns than effective Chinese ones, but the Chinese example falsifies your statement.

There are actually people that the vaccines won’t help. They are immunocompromised. They can only be protected by high vaccination rates and zero exposure to Covid.

And so I can ask the same question, why are you disregarding the harm done to them (them being the young people)?

Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.

> You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.

I’m not, but I’m saying the calculus of restrictions only makes sense for the older parts of society. Younger people are getting a raw deal. They are far less financially secure, established in their careers, their education, their social lives, and even in their personal development. Immense damage is being done in all of these areas to protect society from a disease that isn’t actually a threat to the young in any large degree. Older generations are sacrificing less due to the restrictions, but are reaping all of the benefits. This is especially galling considering the availability of effective vaccines that prevent severe disease and death, meaning that whatever risk does exist for these older generations is largely mitigated for them except for those who refuse vaccination.

So yes, it is enormously selfish for our society to throw young people under the bus to protect the most selfish portion of older, more well-to-do generations who refuse to protect themselves.

It would have also prevented scaling of health systems due to a distinct and dramatic shortage in staffing and long term backlog.

The decision above was purely economic. You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.

None of that is what could be derived or implied from your statement you condescending prick. If that is what you were implying, maybe you should get a better grasp of English so that your point could come across clearer.

The effect seemed to be just what you're describing. Even though most of the non-schooling group got worse jobs to start, they had several years of lead time to build experience and get pay raises which ended up being more valuable than the certificate or degree the other group got.

Foreman earning 170k - how many of them are there? Acsdemia is a really tough job market, maybe except for CS, and nobody claims that scientist is a great career because there are professors who make good living. After all, everyone knows how many PhDs and postdocs leave the academia because of lack of tenured positions.

If you're briliant and top 5%, then you're going to succeed in every job and every trade. The question is what kind of jobs are left to the 95%?

Unionized manufacturing does much better, with steady employment that can exceed 200/hr for the right work. These days you can pretty much only get such jobs via connection as they aren’t creating more of these jobs very frequently.

Source: The 200/hr figure was based on underwater welding for USN ships.

And no one is going to run an experiment on their own life but observationally, yes, that’s what’s happening in aggregate.

Glassdoor has that salary around $75k on average for a small company.

I think this can be applied to a lot of successful professions; they require commitment and, in the case of software engineering, a level of talent. You can't just go to a college or bootcamp and earn tons of money if you don't have the knack, if it doesn't click with you.

The issue here is survivorship bias; the people that earn a lot of money end up talking about, or getting reported on how they make their money, but the 95% earners below that don't get the mention because their jobs and earnings are average and unremarkable.

I mean part of me wants to reach out to a FAANG or hip startup and look for opportunities to see how much I could in theory earn there. But I don't think it would be a match because I don't have the sigma male leetcode grindset.

I fail to see how this is a problem, and whether it should be fixed. The very idea that people that went through college deserve more is insulting for tradespeople as well as the source of bad incentives to go to college. If anything, the society would probably benefit from colleges focusing on transmitting and advancing knowledge, rather than being paid fast-lanes for people who only give a fuck about the payckeck.

This idea that some works deserve fair pay and some work deserve abuse (the worst being "burger flipper", "student job", etc.) really need to die. If you don't think it deserves fair pay and respect, you don't deserve the service.

This needs to be fixed for the school-only path to be viable.

Education degrees and Journalism degrees rank near the bottom of pay.

If you want a good starting salary, invest in a STEM major.

Above all, google "starting salaries for major XXXXX" before picking one. Sheesh!

> 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs

This is a problem that the colleges cannot fix. It's not the college systems fault teacher pay is being held back so much (unless by that you mean they should dramatically increase professors' salaries, so that the higher rates in academia trickle down.)

> 2) There are better options than college for many.

This is point 1 again. Digital Marketing is just a different skilled trade.

> 3) College is way over priced.

Isn't that because tuition has been a larger and larger portion of their income?

> They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree.

Sure, and? That's not relevant to the discussion, because they just isolated one variable. If both statements are true, you would expect a college educated person who had a job before 18 to make 89% more than someone who did neither.

> 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop.

I agree. But it's not the college system's fault that public support (financially) nosedived over the past couple of decades.

That...is one heck of a promotion. Good for her!

I'm not sure universities can fix this, or want to fix this.

Many of the people opting for university degrees aren't looking to perform work that needs to be done, but seeking a role that makes them feel powerful/smart/elegant/influential etc.

In a market-based economy that rewards meeting the needs/wants of others, I'm honestly surprised that many college grads are paid anything at all.

Is this a problem that needs fixing? We don't have enough plumbers & electricians (for example), many in those fields are retiring and until lately there haven't been enough people entering those trades to replace those retiring. Now we're probably going to start seeing people enter those trades at a higher rate than in the recent past. These are very good paying jobs and often it's hard to find a plumber or electrician when you need one.

The real issues are twofold: first, student loans are underregulated and very predatory in a way that car loans and mortgages are not; second, like you said in your third point, college is way overpriced, with the cost of it going up about an order of magnitude over the past few decades with no discernable increase in quality (see the excellent Consideration On Cost Disease for more[1]).

If education was 10x cheaper and student loan rates were 3-5% a year, you wouldn't need the public to fund education - and even if you wanted to, it'd be a far easier time selling that idea than trying to convince people to fund undergraduate degrees to the tune of $100k+ per student.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

I agree college is far too expensive and the rate of inflation of college tuition is rather absurd. The reasons for such, are best debated in another thread. However, I'm skeptical that eliminating student debt would ultimately result in significantly better financial outcomes for young people. Instead, most of the "savings" would be swallowed up by higher real estate and rent costs. The pandemic should serve as prima facie evidence -- give a huge swath of the population more cash, real estate will eat much/most/all of it. Let's say that instead of student debt, the typical 22-32 year-old professional has approximately $500 more spending power. All that means is that they will compete with each other to purchase housing, pushing rents and housing costs up -- not just for themselves but also for everyone else.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reduce student debt (not via forgiveness, but by reducing education costs to begin with) -- but doing so is not a panacea.

A bachelors degree is not a license to practice or guarantee of employment. That is not the point of education.

Having a job before 18 and getting a bachelors degree are not mutually exclusive, in fact, recent data suggests that about half of all people attending undergraduate school are employed. I personally was employed by 16 and went to college at 18, keeping a job for the entire time to offset some of the costs.

I do agree that student loans are a heinous tool though, even moderate loans accrue huge interest during a formative time in your career and prevent you from saving for retirement during the vital years when your investments have the most time to mature.

For decades clueless counselors pushed kids that were not successful academically or with behavioral issues into "the trades"... Only for the kids to realize they do need good reading and academic abilities to be able to succeed as a skilled tradesman. And that it takes disciplines to work in those fields.

We keep hearing about the successful tradespeople (notice how they are all their own bosses and own their shops) who made it but not the auto-repair schools’ dropouts.

Nobody has forced anyone to take a student loan. In fact, many young adults would probably learn a lot about life, financial management, and restraint if they saved for college and waited till they could afford it instead of going straight to college and going into huge amounts of debt. Generally society doesn’t condone going into debt carelessly in other situations so I don’t understand how we give (or want to give) students a free pass for racking up thousands (or hundreds of thousands) in loans.

My startup is trying to help this in the flooring industry. At https://gocarrera.com we have made a platform for contractors to connect to companies and vice versa. We will roll out a feature shortly for people unfamiliar with the industry to be and to find add join other contractor teams to help them get started in the industry. It's really exciting and pretty shocking how complex the industry is.

Hate to say it, but sounds like a diversity promotion to me.

To me this is just a sign that the market is working correctly. The world needs more forklift drivers, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics than it needs teachers. The idea that teachers deserve to be paid more is elitist, IMHO. The problem is that our culture incorrectly assumes college degrees are the only way to “learn” productive and valuable skills.

All that to say, if the economics of college were better, even I (mid-career) would consider going back for a couple of degrees to continue expanding my community.

That's too short sighted. What's the lifetime earning potential of a forklift driver vs a teacher?

Median starting pay for a 4 year degree is over $54k at the moment.

That's a massive difference.

Yes, the whole system is utterly convoluted, twisted, and perverted into dysfunction; but I also find it astonishing that you claim it's some kind of debt-bondage, right after clearly making the point that you can just go into a skilled trade or to a marketing bootcamp and that just alone the drive and work ethic of someone who has a job before 18 will set you up for success.

The real issue is that the upper class has colluded to corrupt the whole education system, largely for self-enrichment, which has also have an exorbitant impact on America's competitiveness by inefficient allocation of human resources into ever increasingly useless degrees. It is not a coincidence that all these changes have correlated the increase in communistic/socialistic type policies and mentalities.

Maybe had a job before age 18 implies later went to college for instance.

E.g. if you take a math degree that teach "2+2 != 5" this degree is likely to reduce mental acuity. You'll be a great activist, but not a great mathematician or teacher.

1. Create needless procedural requirements, each alluding to serve some sort of qualitative intent

2. Hire people to service these requirements

3. Profit?

Instead, my double major in mechanical engineering/applied economics was heavily loaded with highly inefficient, archaic classes in subjects I cared about combined with a heavy dose of mandatory humanities type courses that were essentially ultra-leftwing indoctrination courses. For example, my Latin American history course was a non-stop "Latin America is a crappy place because it doesn't have enough Marxism" course.

I was assigned various books, and as long as I wrote about the books with identical conclusions to the professor, I got an A, no matter how horribly written. If I wrote eloquently about why I thought the book about Gaitan's socialist movement in Columbia wasn't as angelic as depicted in the book, I got a D. Another book that was assigned reading was "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" which is essentially a handbook telling you how to get otherwise happy people to realize they are oppressed and embrace Marxism.

This was the early 2000s, and the predictions about Columbia, for example, couldn't have been more wrong. It's a vastly improved place compared to then, despite the depiction in the class of a sinister, evil, predatory capitalist society. No matter what South American country you discussed, if it was communist/socialist, it was a paradise. If it wasn't, it was a dictatorship. The teacher wouldn't stop talking about how amazing Venezuela was, and how Hugo Chavez was "misunderstood."

Another class I took was called "Economics of Poverty". The professor is a person I can't forget, because long before I had ever heard of Elizabeth Warren, she was a fair skinned, blue-eyed white woman who claimed to be half Native American. I never believed that for a second, and it was obvious she made this claim to advance her career. My favorite moment with her was when she told the entire class that "most of you will graduate from this school and be unable to find meaningful employment. Our economic system doesn't value what you've learned, and you need to fix that." It was a soul-crushing, disempowering experience and I'm furious about how much I bought into her and her colleague's bullshit back then. Pessimistic losers who've never left their bubble ruining young minds as they themselves live off of the oppressive debt the students are taking on.

I don't have a problem with nutbag activists, but I deeply resent the Federal government subsidizing them and their foolish causes, on the backs of 17 year olds signing away their lives for debt.

But that's a starting wage in tech in Seattle or the Bay area for an engineer that's in demand and it only goes up from there. Those engineers that are in demand all have undergraduate degrees, it's a huge virtue signal for hiring for now. A new college graduate with one year of industry experience got poached for $400k by a competitor. And that doesn't begin to cover what AI superstars make straight out of school.

Ironically as someone in the later phases of my tech career, I am increasingly interested in trade skills over tech skills. And doubly ironically there's a lot of intellectual overlap.

The alternative, IMO, is to make state run schools tuition free, but there's no guarantee you'll get in. Use some relatively objective metrics like the SAT and relative standing in high school class to determine eligibility. Then get rid of federal lending altogether. Apparently this is more similar to some of the European models. Under this model, any highly gifted but poor person worried about debt can get a higher education. Granted, the gifted person is also generally okay in the current model, because they probably end up making enough to handle their debt. It's the less gifted person who still wants and benefits from a higher education, but can't get into the free state school, who benefits in this model, because the removal of unqualified lending will bring down prices of less competitive colleges.

But in the end, college as we know it, as great of an experience as it is for many of us, is likely becoming obsolete (in its current form, that is) with the rise of the internet and the ability to learn just about anything in your garage with an internet connection and a computer.

My alma mater finally merged CS and SWE, then moved the new CS/SWE degree to Engineering because engineering basically prints money.

Yeah, the crucial thing that most people miss in these discussion is that most schools don’t actually effectively teach what they claim to be teaching. Teachers and students go through the motions, but the students don’t actually end up learning much of anything, and the teachers who nevertheless give them passing grade face no consequence. If a typical high school started offering aircraft maintenance certification, instead of increasing the graduates value on job market, it would simply make the certification to be held as worthless.

College currently mostly exists as an early-life service, but alternative paths exist: in the US, people in the military can go to college later in life. In some countries, people can get college education at evening courses. We could envision that some people starting early in life in physically hard jobs may want/have to retire years earlier, and use that time to go through college our of personal interest.

This isn't really possible with an onerous college system mostly dedicated to social layering, but an university system with scholarships for everyone and flexibility in the time and way people enroll is not an impossible goal.

I for one would really like to return to university after I retire, for instance.

https://c0arw235.caspio.com/dp/b7f930003542e89a6fb844548260

Neither options are super easy.

But when you're that age, it's impossible to weigh the economics of how many MRI / CT / medical imaging engineering positions are going to be available when you graduate in 4 years, vs how many other fresh grads will be applying for them. The only thing you know is that if you diverge from the path expected of you too much, the other fresh grads will have a competitive advantage over you so you just have to take the gamble that what you're studying will be employable.

PLUS loans are supplemental loans with a higher rate than regular direct undergraduate (3.73%) or graduate/professional (5.28%) student loans.

If you wonder why Democrats get so hesitant to do anything about the situation there is one of your reasons why. (there are alot more reasons but thats a decent reason)

This means that even in the same school the math teacher for kids entering grade 8 does not know what material was covered before. Some kids may have been exposed to a particular topic, some may have never seen it. So teachers have to go over the basic material again and again and again, which makes it very hard to give a solid course.

In Europe (at least in some countries), there is a standard program, so the teacher in grade 8 math knows that all prerequisites have been seen by every student. So they give a very brief refresher at the beginning of the year and can turn to the new material. Even better, when a topic is covered in a physics class, the physics teacher knows that the corresponding math tools have already been covered in the math classes.

I fail to see how you can be an electrician longer than a software engineer, but even if that was true there are far more careers a college degree enable that pay more.

I would not want to be on the team that does a risk assessment with these facts as inputs, because the results would be politically untenable.

I don't know a full answer, but I believe we can start with administrators and work our way through the system. Something has got to give. This system cannot stay as it currently exists.

I can agree with you on that.

If you have a very specific career in mind then sure go for it, but just telling people to "go into the trades" is probably harmful.

This was the case for me, though I wouldn't classify as being "screwed."

I attended a private tech school, and they were upfront they would not accept credits for any engineering program pre-reqs (Math, Chem, CS, Tech Comm, etc). However, they would accept "humanities" credits an apply them to any electives required for our chosen degree.

Luckily, I had participated in our schools "running start" so I earned those credits while in high school, and my only intention of taking math at the time was to fulfill my highschool math requirements. I did also take 2-years of mandarin, which my school gladly accepted and counted towards my electives.

All that being said, in Washington state, all publicly funded schools must accept all credits from Community Colleges, AND guarantee admission, so if you are a student looking to attend a state school in Washington state, community college is a very attractive route.

Much more than that. The ivy league admits ~20k a year. That number jumps to a few hundreds of thousands if you extend to flagship state schools & the Dukes, Northwesterns, and Stanfords of the world.

But certainly, not all community colleges are alike. If you want to transfer to a bachelor's program, you want to find a community college with a competent transfer program that is hopefully aligned with your destination and at least has a track record of transfering students who go on to get their bachelors. Some community colleges aren't great at that.

Also, California community colleges are very affordable, but some states don't have that. If community college has costs in line with 4 year schools, then it might not be a great choice.

"On average, smarter people make more over their lifetime than less smart people bro, that is a fact!"

1. Can’t predict the future.

2. How does the finer division by non college jobs look like? Electrician is one of the top- how does it compare to a doctor accounting the medical debt?

3. Average college debt is 30k. Hardly crippling.

Edit: I'm not trying to claim there aren't good trades, just that the "word on the block" about how easy it is to get a job doesn't always reflect reality.

3. Not cheap compared to what exactly? College graduates generally get paid more money over the lifetime.

It's surprisingly similar to software development in that regard, once you get skilled enough you can get better money contracting than being employed and right now there's so much work that the "safety net" doesn't concern you.

If you give people who aren't cut out to do something, a chance to do that thing, it's expected that more people will fail. We are now living with the predictable result of pushing unmotivated and uninterested kids to "just try it out", and handing them a credit card to do it with.

Most public state schools keep their pricing in line with these caps ($35k in loans + ~$5k in grants). I just picked on Iowa because, and here's a list I found:

https://www.universityreview.org/iowa-colleges/

You'll notice that in-state tuition for all public state schools is around $8k a year. Here's the same for Tennessee:

https://www.universityreview.org/tennessee-colleges/

The issue is that if lenders looked at creditworthiness for college loans the way they do for mortgages, either the price of college would have to decline precipitously, or they would trust far fewer people with that amount of money.

And no, they do NOT make good money.

Giving out loans with no cap on how much schools can charge and with no ability-to-repay check is a recipe for catastrophe.

I think option 2 is the best equitable outcome but is probably politically unsavory given the heterogeneity in public school costs/quality across states (which typically aligns with political divides).

Out of interest, what are other fields besides IT?

The evidence suggests that bootcamp grads struggle at finding good jobs, and also bootcamps charge a lot up-front, whereas collages have more aid and other programs to defer payment.

While I agree with your core sentiment, my opinion is that this is a symptom of a cultural/societal problem and not one of the schools. Modern Universities are certainly ripe with problems (largely driven by adopting business structures), including generally poor quality courses and curriculum within them, but I think you've identified a larger societal problem we have.

Why is it that broad education which is generally, at the very least in my opinion, clearly valuable yet so lowly valued in society? It's my opinion that we have institutional structures that, given a lack of opportunities, value specialized and specific knowledge over general knowledge.

Meanwhile, if you have the capability to escape these institutional shackles, general knowledge becomes far more valuable. On the labor side, labor markets are all about jobs and specialized roles with efficient production from that role. On the capital side, you need more general knowledge to see, connect, and sieze opportunities. It seems to me that most lack enough genuine realizable opportunity where general knowledge becomes valuable (say, seeking entrepreneurship) and in such a set of constraints, it makes complete sense why people specialize and chase demand of specialization because it's their most optimal strategy for financial success.

I work in R&D in startup-esk environments and my general knowledge is fairly well valued, however even here leadership sometimes fail to see how some book or article I read years ago, course I took, project I worked on years ago, etc. was critical to making the connection that made this research thing possible.

They value the general subset of knowledge I have that made their thing possible (oh boy you know A, B, and C and those saved us!!!), never mind the hydrology work I've done, it's irrelevant (D, or so they think, even though I may draw on concepts from such domains opaquely) or perhaps hours of video gaming (E, which lead to a game theoretic intuition about approaching an underlying problem). That knowledge was only appreciated after the fact because it made someone a pile of money or positioned a large contract.

I remember hating taking geology in college because "I'd never use it," then I did a lot of applied science and R&D in the fossil fuels industry and suddenly a lot of "silly" things I did in geology gave me a foundation to jump from and to build upon. That silly geology course made me boatloads of money in retrospect. Throughout my career I always like to look back when I have a problem and say "ah ha, I sure am glad I studied or read about X years ago, that's one less thing I need to internalize now to do this thing." I'm always surprised how much old general knowledge I draw upon for new problems and how valuable they truly are.

It's expensive, but nice work if you can get it

As to your question. It’s easier to get a degree now since standards have been lowered since we need to retain students. The cost of acquiring a student is much higher than retaining a student so a lot of effort has gone into retention. What this boils down to in my opinion is the need to pass students. Not failing students is the easiest way to retain them.

It could be that people who are driven or passionate, on average, want to pursue higher education, or that they take on risks, exercise their brains in learning endeavors, and it’s their effort and drive that leads to success.

It’s entirely possible that high earners have college degrees because they were told that to be successful, they had to go to college. It’s a belief they were raised with.

I think it’s highly misguided that we give college so much credit. And we also demonstrate survivorship bias where those who went to college but didn’t get the pay off are blamed for having made some wrong decision.

We treat higher education as a silver bullet and put it on a pedestal when it’s not.

> Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ...

But that's exactly the point, a huge expectation of going to college is the whole college experience: building independence, lifelong friendships, extracurriculars, etc. 50k for Zoom? Fuck that.

Speculation but maybe boomer money allows their kids not to need to work as much as past.

You can also go to the Cal State system. SDSU, for example. You can also put in two years at a community college and then transfer across.

Graduating from an ABET accredited engineering school is just fine.

Pitt and CMU engineers used to have this debate back at Westinghouse and the general consensus was the primary difference between the engineers was 10 years extra to pay off your student loans.

> - rent seekers like Pearson and Mcgraw Hill (fun fact, did you know the 2 joined forces to run a company called Follets that runs most campus bookstores (how is that allowed?)

This makes me furious. ALL of the universities I know lost their really nice bookstores that you could browse through.

The problem is that the bookstore has two spikes of book profitability and the rest of time the books are a waste of space. That's "inefficient"--so everybody outsourced and now the "campus bookstore" is just a gift shop with a small wing to shuffle online book orders at the beginning of the term.

The current total cost for UCLA is $36,297 per year for California residents, $28,408 if you're living with relatives. That is for the 9 months per year fall/spring session, so summer school/housing/etc is not included. This is also only for your direct educational expenses. In that budget your "personal" expenditures are set at about $5/day which includes entertainment, recreation, clothing, etc.

And perhaps the biggest problem of all is that it is intentionally made exceptionally easy to take out additional loans, generally just clicking an extra button while setting up your schedule/financing for the next semester. As most college age individuals (let alone those attending a decent university) expect they're going to be millionaires at some point, it is an exceptionally exploitative system feeding off widespread completely unrealistic life expectations. It's easy to rationalize how much nicer $xxxxx would make your life today, while how little value it will have tomorrow. But for most, tomorrow will never come.

Cool claim, have any supporting evidence? Personally, I don’t believe that. The opportunities that you have as a result of the skills that you have can create great divergence in lifetime earnings. You’re making a pretty extraordinary claim.

Ugh. Why?

You asked for a statistically grounded conversation, so let's do that.

Let's start, for example, with pdf page 25 (and surrounding context) of https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/causal_educ_earnings.p...

The analysis done in that paper is a good starting point for a productive conversation. We could discuss the bounds on various coefficients and decide whether the conditional statements about those coefficients made in the paper have clear answers in either direction. Or we could critique the various modeling assumptions. Etc.

Housing and supplies are still expensive, and _yes_ it’s still very expensive to go to college, but there are affordable options out there for college.

[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-system [2] https://www.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for-college/Documents... [3] https://www.calstate.edu/apply/transfer/pages/ccc-associate-...

That figure has risen to about 36% today, a 3.5x increase.

Chart: http://www.mygovcost.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/governme...

Source: http://www.mygovcost.org/2011/03/14/the-u-s-as-welfare-state... (the first random example I found on Google)

PPP was a boon - 'Here is a loan that converts to freebie money for millions of companies'. Where'd the money go? Buying Lambo's and the like.

Or, when can I get a tax abatement for 10 years? COmpanies can because of this mythical 'they create jobs' tripe.

Just look up corporate welfare. And if I was permitted to, I would.

I've passed on a traditional uni for this because I want to avoid debt, and still get "why don't you go to uni?"'d every so often by family and acquaintance's.

And if the argument is "well, if you don't make enough to pay it, just don't!", as GP appears to be, I don't like spending other people's tax dollars dishonestly - especially not on textbook companies [0] and an expanding administrative staff.

[0] Which bribe and cut-throat their way into forcing $100+ payments per student per class per semester. Pirating or buying second hand doesn't even work half the time now - you need the "online access", aka DRM.

If they're not hard to learn, then imo it's not a "skilled trade".

> those who know it just pretend they are hard to keep people out.

> Of course with an engineering background I know how to read all the different tables and understand where the numbers came from.

If you're an EE and you're referring to electricians, I would argue that electrical work is not an easy concept for most of the population which is one reason for its market demand.

Student loans are government-guaranteed and cannot be absolved by bankruptcy. This IMO creates a perfect storm whereby under-informed teenagers can get massive loans they have no hope of repaying. Without the government/no bankruptcy components to this equation, the market would not support this kind of debt market.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix. There are two simple options (and probably many more complex ones):

1. Make it a free market. Make student debt absolvable by bankruptcy. Don't give government guarantees. Private loans will account for the viability of student's repaying those loans, while allowing bankruptcy helps ensure that unfair or predatory loans will be costly to the loan-issuer.

2. Make it a government service, like K-12. The government will actively manage the tertiary education market, thus making "the cost of college" a policy decision.

IMO the first one is not particularly desirable because it will limit college access to the upper socio-economic classes, further exacerbating wealth inequality and reducing social mobility. That leaves us with the second option, which is both straightforward to implement and has many case-studies abroad.

The OP said he could just "reach into savings" and whip out 12k. That is an INCREDIBLY privileged position to be in and I would urge you both to re-evaluate your perspective.

People taking care of their sick mother, or paying for expensive medication for chronic illnesses, or living in a poor job market area, or have poor credit due to narcissistic parents taking out loans in their name, battling mental illness, or are paying child support, etc; are not "edge cases". They make up a considerable number of people who are struggling with the compounded failures of the system layered over of them.

It was Margaret Mead who said something to the effect that "The earliest sign of true civilization, was that of a healed femur." This was said because a femur is not something that can be healed without assistance from someone else to bandage you, care for you, and fetch food for you.

What is the point of civilized society and public policy if not to ensure that "edge cases" are treated as equitably as the general public? Why do you not have the same mentality when somebody breaks a leg? Why should society care for the outcomes of poor decision making: for example, such as playing contact sports, that results in a broken leg?

Also please quit spewing the nonsense of "didn't choose a marketable major". I see this a lot with STEM grads, shitting on the arts, and then turning around and watching DUNE on HBOMax. Everybody enjoys the work of "non-marketable" majors, but nobody wants to pay for it.

That's quite the story you've created for yourself. I'm sure it makes it easy to dismiss the issue out of hand.

https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...

Edit: Found an article[0] that links to a study[1]

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over... [1] - https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...

How much of this is just labour side supply/demand? If you have an all-male profession suddenly open up to women then that effectively doubles the pool of candidates. You would expect wages to go down (a lot) in that case.

My own experience was that professors who were not currently research oriented tended to have a much more personal interest in actually teaching- not just the material, but in the practice of pedagogy overall.

Compare that to researching professors (or worse, their grad student substitutes) and it is often a night and day difference. All you're really paying more for is often the name on your diploma at the end of the day.

There's no context that changes this. Private loans make up less than 8% of all student debt. There are numerous sources available. This isn't in dispute by anyone (except maybe yourself).

Given that fact, the only way your premise, that the vast majority of students take private loans, can be true is if most students take very very small private loans of less than a few thousand dollars.

And even that is demonstrably false. Because we have data that clearly shows that the vast majority of students don't take private loans.

https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-student-aid-201...

>...that scholarships are rare...

More than 75% of full time students receive at least 1 scholarship or grant. Most of them aren't enough to cover the full tuition much less room and board, but they aren't rare.

And in many states have large scholarship programs as I've mentioned where tens of thousands of students in the state get that scholarship.

>The evidence I have readily available concludes...

Confirmation bias is something to watch out for. There's no evidence outside of your personal experience to support the conclusion that "the vast majority of students take private loans."

2. Where are the stats?

3. Sure, many colleges are worth it too. State schools don’t cost 45k a semester. Don’t know how you can spread misinformation.

4. Community college can be very cheap, it depends on where you are and how poor you are so it’s hard to draw broad strokes here.

It's time to start funding these schools adequately so that they do not immiserate everyone except those with wealthy parents. It's the opposite of a meritocracy.

Having a house and children as soon as possible isn't a win. It's what happens when you lack imagination. There's so much more to life than pumping out kids at 21 in your 3/2 in fly over country.

For most people this routing when they are 10 (or so) decides what routes are open to them later in life. There are exceptions to this (my host sister went to Realschule, and later took the Abiture, the the test that got her into college), but they are pretty rare.

I have always been a bit leery of choices made so early in life, but it works pretty well in Germany.

It's only the pseudo-social scientists who can't do proper data analysis (finding out the real confounding variable) that push the college propaganda

I guess in the UK you'd try for an apprenticeship with day release to college for the academic elements (or take a job in a technical field and do an Open University or other distance learning course for the academic side?).

Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.

There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.

Here's a high level report showing some of the state funding changes. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/10-24-1...

And while I have sympathy for your story, it isn't much more than what you want to be true. As an example: even a rather stupid medical doctor will tend to earn a lot of money. So, assuming you are capable of getting the degree, it will likely pay well.

Another large group goes into teaching, where income is also set mostly by your degree and tenure, not individual skills.

None of that is definite. I'm just trying to show how you can spin a story either way. But refuting the data which is clear on this across time and many countries requires more than a good story.

The question why you'd want to believe that is rather natural, as are your emotions. The mythological welders with 6-digit incomes are a staple on HN, so it isn't really unusual. I guess it's part of a cluster of attitudes best described as anti-elitism.

Basically, if you do not already have a force multiplier is the reward of college worth the huge loan that can't be dismissed in bankruptcy?

Nothing is wrong with going to trade school or boot camp or whatever, or even just being a laborer.