For the crowd that tends to be frequenting places like HN, I still believe college to very much be worth it. There are many viable paths to almost any outcome, but college is a rare time where you are constantly surrounded by opportunity with minimal effort: these opportunities include being exposed to new ideas, meeting new people as peers, meeting new people as mentors, and jobs that can make you money or jobs that can prove exceptionally meaningful. Not to mention that it’s a generically good tool for passing a baseline for many people in many circumstances (job applications, cold reach outs, meeting the parents — any circumstance where you are a stranger, it signals that you are more likely to be responsible than not knowing whether you went to college).

Of course, it’s possible to eschew these opportunities, but if you ever have a moment of clarity to try and live life a little better, the opportunities are there within reach. At any later point in life, these things can be hard to come by serendipitously, and they tend to require a relatively steep active effort.

In general, upfront life investment is exceptionally valuable, and the (all encompassing) human gestation period easily extends through college age in modern society. I think the issue of its worth is typically for people that were underserved in their grade school years, which is probably a decently large percentage of the country.

I think that college and secondary schooling are worth what you invest into them. The cost of attendance is not an investment in either case. If you cannot afford the cost of attendance, which is significant, then you should not consider attendance in either at all.

Your personal effortful reading and learning, and demonstrated efforts to apply that learning make up the investment so to speak. Ultimately, internet repositories, professional mentors, and public libraries are worth more than college degrees in and of themselves, but not everyone can access and leverage these resources properly, due to lack of information literacy or professional and academic preparation.

Simply put, college is not worth it—-you are what’s worth it. Invest in yourself, through paid or free human resource development, and you will reap rewards. If you attend college without applying yourself properly, you will have made zero progress and also face a financial deficit. If you do not attend college but manage to apply yourself and be resourceful, you will have certainly made significant progress and you will have avoided debt.

I think college is still the best preparation to become an educator, which I am (Ph.D. with 15y experience in academia).

Graduate level jobs still require you to have recently graduated from something.

In my field that means "a degree in computer science or equivalent". It's still the path of least resistance for getting through the door. Yes, there are often other routes, but they all involve working harder than everyone else.

Apprenticeships don't really scale for corporate roles, there are too many candidates, and it requires too much investment from employers. College outsources parts of this, it's one last filter to weed out "the weirdos" - the graduates come prepackaged, indebted and pliable, ready to be slotted in and adsorbed by the system.

College can be immensely valuable for those pursuing fields that require formal credentials and rigorous training. However, with the raise of blended/bootcamp education and significant financial burden of traditional degrees, it's critical to weigh the costs against the potential benefits.

The traditional 5-6 years of studying one core subject makes me a bit worried these days due to the speed of change in the current job market.

Ultimately, education should be a strategic choice, not an automatic one.

No. Bachelor's only if you're getting a paid ride. Anything else make sure it's than 2 years, and it's a program that proves industry placement and strong connections. You will be stuck with a useless bachelor's in most programs today.

I have 30 years of industry experience, but I am obviously not as useful as someone who read a book about things other people have done and took a multiple choice quiz about it.

if you are learning a skill sure. i got my degree in business/marketing and it was a complete waste of time.

College grads still make on average roughly 2x what high school grads make, so yes, so college is worth it in an economic sense. Yes, some majors are more lucrative than others, yes you can screw up anything, but in aggregate and on average, it will ~double your income.

But economics/capitalism is only one lens through which to look at this. College is NOT vocational training. You don't go to college to become more useful to your overlords. Ideally, after college you would be useless to overlords.

If you get a high paying job? Yes. If you get a low paying job? No.

College is notoriously survivor biased, and the metrics that nearly all studies use to justify whatever they happen to be selling that day is horseshit. There are a lot of malevolent parasites that make their way into forever jobs like these.

What I would personally like to see is a study of class section pass-rates that properly segment first-attempt students from re-attempt students in the metrics. The Administration doesn't collect these because it would shine visibility on a decades old problem, showing they have a conflict of interest (they want a forever student, and to take your federally subsidized money).

There is a lot of fraud that happens in various different forms within these systems, that is undisclosed upfront.

Physics had the notorious 3 question fail test, where questions were dependent on getting the correct answers from all previous questions, along with undisclosed rules that contradict curricula taught rules (significant digits). If you rounded at each problem you failed, if you rounded at just the last problem you failed. In other words it embeds a causality property biasing the pass distribution greatly (only the top ~10-15% would pass).

Material may not be covered, but still tested on, and this may come in many different forms. Some are very tricky indeed to spot.

Answering inferential questions, for them to be valid they require that there be a signal that is easily differentiable from the material taught (SNR) which allows comparison between two similar answers but one correct straightforward answer, this signal is usually attenuated to the point of denial of service (jamming), or the wording used is ambiguous (having two contradictory meanings, one of which must be guessed).

The amount of time required to succeed may be non-standard (i.e. 3 hours / week per 1 unit is typical, but some classes are as high as 7-9). There are finite hours in the day, and to receive federal funding one must get 12 units. This may range from 34 hours/week for 16 weeks to 70+ depending on the hidden variables for the class.

Worse, the tools that are marketed to teachers for these classes use dark patterns, or do not disclose the effect (to induce additional failures). Pearson did this as recently as 2022, where they embedded per-student randomized exam pools and the teacher couldn't access the questions on the test (and you can't rely on a signal from the class because each test is unique), and other psychological patterns such as forcing you to confirm that you got the answer wrong before you can continue (with big red text), whereas correct answers just continue on. Almost like beating a mallet on the student every time they get it wrong, while tossing invectives their way. You think that won't have an impact on performance?

You can literally spend 20 years going to school and never actually complete a degree (same area of study), and not from a matter of not knowing the material.

Normally someone would mention that if there were problems there are routes you can take to address them but that's not actually true either. They do have feedback systems, but those feedback systems are broken feedback systems.

There is no duty to investigate a complaint. Any investigation is viewed by the faculty as creating a hostile work environment. They are all peers, from the Chair, to the Dean, to the Board of Trustees. Its all about social standing, and students have none.

I would be ineffably better off today if I had never gone to college just from the financial toll its taken over the years, and the health toll (in hours worked for a pipedream).

I majored in Statistics and Probability. By the mid 1980s, departments were starting to look at the distribution of grades. This lead to teachers giving really difficult tests and then having a large 'curve'. The problem with matching a grade distribution to the Normal Curve, is that by definition the Normal Curve is the absolute wrong goal for grades distribution. A normal distribution requires multiple inputs where none is deterministic. That is the opposite of how a class with a standardized curriculum should fall. Yes there should be variation but the use of the Normal Curve with needlessly difficult tests has caused many departments to be proud of their burn rate with incoming freshmen. In engineering then they routinely pushed out nearly half the freshmen, and had the burn continue into second year. The issue is these engineering students were also part of several 'colleges' who at the time had different policies about grades. One college didn't allow any redos, if you took a class a second time you'd get the two grades. Where another college would allow retaking the class and erasing the old grade. That school eventually merged the colleges and standardized the grading policies but I'm not sure they have any kind of redress to the engineering throwaways. These departments who have high facilities and equipment costs are what I saw pulled that the most often, they used those students whom they were actively harming more than half to subsidize their academic department. Advice I got when I was in the search for college, "Go to the best school you can get the best grades in".