But we need to start recognizing that most college degrees aren't required to do most jobs, and it's basically rent-seeking behavior.
I've helped interview and hire three additional software engineers for my teams over the past 2.5 years. None of the applicants with a B.S. in SWE could hold a candle to the self-taught applicants. Those are my anecdotes, but we interviewed multiple applicants with B.S SWE degrees from Auburn, the University of Alabama, and the University of Tennessee. None of them were close to being as prepared as the applicants, who were a little older and had no college degrees but decided to pursue SWE independently.
I had a very successful career in construction when I was a young man. First, I wore a tool belt, and then I got into commercial construction management. I work for one of the Top 5 builders in the world. I decided to move back to the states and put down some roots. I expected to land a construction management job in Auburn easily. However, none of the companies would even give me a chance to interview because I didn't have a B.S. in Building Science from Auburn.
As it turns out, everyone and their mother has a Building Science degree from Auburn. So, I also decided to pursue one until I learned how much the people were earning. They were spending ~$100k on a degree only to graduate and earn far less than I earned while wearing a tool belt.
So, I put my tool belt back on and went to work.
I pivoted into SWE a few years ago without a degree. However, to get to the executive level, the head of our company suggested that I obtain a degree. So, I completed an SWE degree at WGU. I didn't learn anything while pursuing the degree, but at least I have that piece of paper hanging in my office now.
I have many more anecdotes I could share to show why I think most college degrees are rent-seeking behavior, but I guess anecdotes don't account for much at the end of the day.
Me, I have a degree in math, but 97% of what I know is stuff I picked up either on the job, or because I found it interesting. Besides those that picked up CS as a major when it was a hot field, I'm betting that some of them get the love of tech beaten out of them by their college experience. I certainly know more than one science major who felt that way after graduating. (Not me, though. I'm weird, and I still love math just as much as I always did. Maybe even more.)
People can get new experiences and meet people in much more efficient ways.
This happens with mortgages too. People with a mortgage tend to religiously pay it off as required so they don't lose their house while people without, somehow don't manage to build equivalent wealth even though they could be scrupulously investing their spare money just as much. And once you have a house, it's easier to keep it than to keep a pile of money. Often when people die, almost their only wealth is their house. Where did all the rest of what they earned their entire life go?
The current system grades people as failures if they fail to complete the whole course.
> One of them actually dropped out of ~~college~~ high school(!), then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.
STEM are also, I think, the wrong field(s) in which to rely on critical thinking to, _broadly speaking_, be taught. The technical background - programming languages or maths or basic biology / chemistry - that have to be assimilated before reaching that point are too high a hurdle for most students. Humanities, with a natural-language corpus + common experience, are a more-accessible approach. (The trivium, if you're familiar with classical-education terminology.)
That's not to say STEM courses can't teach critical thinking - they can, and must - nor that educators in Humanities haven't done a piss-poor job of it over the last half-century or so. That is to say that the general decline in critical thinking skills is mostly attributed to the decline in the status of and standards within the Humanities disciplines.
(1) Not entirely a function of bachelor's programs that produce conformant wage workers.
(2) Not worth the high tuition and debt at all.
I can't help but imagine that there have got to exist far better and cheaper ways to learn how to think. I would like to see more entrepreneurship colleges that force people to innovate, also to bootstrap without external investment.
One of the things I was lucky to have as a part of my college experience was access to a group of professors who, while they certainly were not on the cutting edge of their fields in terms of research, cared a lot about good teaching. I wasn't an lit major, or a linguistics major, or a French major, but I was able to take courses in contemporary literature, history of the English language, and modern French literature with people who were, taught by experts in those fields who were there for the sole purpose of doing so.
Then there was the course I took that was ostensibly a political science course, titled simply "General seminar." General seminar was a 1 credit course taught by one of our two political science professors. The only required prerequisite was an invitation. He taught the course generally once a year, and he'd invite 5-6 students, generally juniors and seniors, to literally come over to his house once a week, eat dinner, and discuss a book that was the chosen topic for the semester. There was a rotation for who was supposed to be the facilitator for the evening, but that tended to be an easy job. With ~5 hand-picked, upper division college studnets from multiple majors, discussion generally chose its own direction after the initial introduction and maybe a couple general questions to the group to bootstrap things.
Because I came in to college with 8 college credits already from having taken the calculus sequence at one of the local colleges, rather than screw around with AP, I was nearly a semester ahead of everyone else in my cohort when classes started freshman year. These were not introductory courses, so, often, I'd be the only non-major in the room. Even so, I was held to every bit the same standard as they were.
With only 5 professors in the entire math department, the catalog offerings were mostly limited to the basics: calculus I-III, linear algebra, abstract algebra I-II, differential equations, geometry, probability, mathematical statistics I, real analysis, and a course in foundations that was a capstone course. I took literally all of those, due to having started with those 8 extra credits.
I won't say it was a plus or a minus, but one property of going to a school with only 1200 students is that people will get to know each other. I swear, when I was in college, more people knew my name than whose names I knew. But, that also led to me being able to take independent study courses in elementary field theory, introductory Galois theory, and axiomatic set theory.
Oh, and the foundations course? Yeah, that was a weird combo of like, a month of elementary number theory, followed by a course in point set topology. The topology portion was taught via the Moore method. To this day, I still remember standing up in front of the class (all 5 of us ), and giving what was, and probably still is, to this day, the world's worst correct proof that the real line is connected. The classroom was a small auditorium, equipped with blackboards that rolled up to reveal a second set of blackboards behind them. That gave me 4 blackboards to fill up, and fill them up, I did! But, by golly, when I put my piece of chalk down, Theorem 23 was proved, and C (for "continuum") was well and truly known to be connected!
The point is, although I said in another comment that I now believe I made a suboptimal choice by going to the school I did, given that I was at a SLAC and not a large, research university, I also believe I took full advantage of the resources and strengths of the school I did go to. You might say I learned something about how to think and formulate ideas during my undergrad, but I'd be willing to bet many of those in my graduating class just did it for the piece of paper. You know, the key that unlocks the gateway to the middle class.
But, who am I to question them? :)
The article also switches back and forth talking about different timeframes. It starts off by talking about tuition trajectory since 2014. Usually when I hear people lamenting the increase in college costs, they're talking about a much longer timeframe, like since the 1970s. And indeed the article says:
> This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation.
But then in the next paragraph:
> Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.
Those are two different timeframes. Either may be useful, but you can't support a statement like "well costs haven't really gone up" by just cherry-picking random numbers from decades apart.
The last two paragraphs of the article talk about colleges "advertising their value proposition" and how they "can’t afford to push students away". This smacks of a corporate viewpoint towards higher education that makes me suspicious of the whole piece.
Also, maybe less people go into prestigious and expensive unis and go into less expensive ones, which brings the average down?
I look into the colleges for my kids right now and honestly unclear how I can afford putting 2 kids through reasonably good schools. Govt tells me I should be able to afford to pay about $80K per year for 4 years, and I do not see how I can do that without getting HELOC/second mortgage and tapping into my retirement savings. I just do not see how these prices are reasonable or go down.
>Since 2014-15 school year the cost attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation.
Not sure how the cost is calculated though. The cost will be tuition, room and board, fees, less scholarships/grants (effectively college lowering the price to get the customer in), less various loans. If the loans are excluded from the cost this is not accurate, this is still the money the school will be getting, and the student will be paying. Also notice 2014-2015 and ONLY public four year school qualifiers (cost at private colleges continued to go up, although, according to the author, less then inflation).
> Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s.
Yeah no, this doesn't read like an honest analysis but as an attempt to drag the facts, kicking and screaming, to align with the author's agenda.
Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Per wiki:
With assets of approximately $14 billion, Hewlett is one of the wealthiest grant makers in the United States.
Hmph. I guess the millions of successful college graduates are not providing enough positive PR mindshare, so they had to go buy some. Can't wait for their fine tuned LLM.
Colleges know that outside of a few suckers, few will pay the full price even if they have the money. So they offer massive discounts to get you to sign. To help seal the deal, they will market the discount as something special for you based on your "merit". "Normally we charge $75k, but since you're so awesome we can give you a $30k merit scholarship." Sounds like you're getting a great deal as long as you don't find out that the actual average charged tuition is $35k and you're actually the one getting milked.
Now all of a sudden the colleges are like, well technically we can get that down to 85,000 of student loan debt for an English degree. Don't you want to come to college and have a lot of fun!
I still think college is a net positive for most people, but you seriously need to evaluate where you're at and decide what you want to spend. Unless you get into a dream school, or something extremely specific for your major almost everyone should go to community college .
The reason why is if you have a bad year at community college and you just don't want to do it, you're only out a few thousand dollars versus 20 or 30.
Second, when you're ready to transfer you should have a good idea of what you actually want to do and then you can pick a college appropriately. Optimistically you'll graduate with half the student loan debt .
You can have just as much fun going to a cheap community college, and then a cheap state school. And outside of a small handful of outliers the net results are going to be the same. If you get in the Harvard, go ahead and go to Harvard. But if you get into Billy's weird expensive private school, that's not worth the money.
Between birth rates dropping and student loan reality, we're going to see an absolute tsunami of small school closures. Which isn't good or bad, it's just a sign of the times.
While I'm ranting, I absolutely resent this notion of college being necessary to obtain an upper middle-class lifestyle. It's just not, and I know this from personal experience despite finishing college years later. You end up putting a lot of people in a really nasty loop, you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college. That also justifies indefinite debt loads, so what you have to go $200,000 in student loan debt. The nice salesperson said you're practically guaranteed a six figure job when you graduate!
You graduated into a bad economy and end up working at Vons. Sucks to be you, by the way Sallie Mae expects your first payment in 60 days. May the odds be in your favor.
It sometimes seems as this support comes out of nowhere after years of not being involved in their child’s life.
So my question is what motivates this? Are they right? Is it really important for their kids future to go to a top 70 instead of 130? (I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money)
Is this based on college being a good time in their life and they are projecting that experience? Do they feel obligated to “finish strong” in regards to parenting?
The attitude of my parents is to make sure the degree will lead to a job, and then find a local and cheap school to get that credential. I believe there may be taboo class issues around this topic that are not vocalized.
Is the reduction in price entirely due to discounts, or is it also counting student loans that have to be paid back?
Because it keeps using the term "financial aid" throughout, but financial aid includes both grants/scholarships and loans.
And if the amount you have to pay immediately is going down but the part you have to pay after graduation is going up by the same amount, that's not necessarily good news.
It's bizarre that the article doesn't address this distinction at all. I want to believe the total price (including loans that need to be paid back) is going down -- but with student debt ever-increasing, I'm suspicious.
Which
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-...
1. Unless you have schools falling all over trying to recruit you, go to an in-state public university. By "trying to recruit you" I mean schools literally flying you out to visit and offering you full scholarship because you are an ungodly talent in whatever you do (sports, music, etc.). Schools mailing you letters and offering you $5k doesn't count, that can't offset the cost of private or out of state tuitions. For most middle class people, the jobs you'll be getting don't care about whether you went to UNC or VT, or K-State, or whatever- public state universities are kind of all judged the same and it's not worth the extra cost to go out of state.
a. If you want to really get a good deal, go to a community college for a year or two and live with your parents, then transfer to the state school when you have done your core classes and are ready to focus on your major.
b. Still apply for scholarships even if you're going to a state school with in state tuition. Pretty much anyone can swing a few grand in grants and scholarships, and if you get a job (or are lucky enough for your parents to pitch in) you can graduate debt free. Being debt-free from a state school is far better than having $40k or more in debt from a private school with moderate name recognition.
3. Definitely don't go to a small private liberal arts college. I have good friends that teach at these kinds of schools, and while they are a nice community to work in, they are a bad deal for students. People are starting to figure this out, smaller liberal arts colleges are at higher risk of shutting down. They unite the costs of a private school with the faculty the size of a community college, with the uncertainty of not knowing if your school will be open in four years to give you a degree.
If you do #1 above you'll have done the common sense thing and you'll really appreciate it as an adult when you hear your coworkers complaining about their mountain of debt from their college that sounded cool but turned out to be kinda crappy.
Maybe it's different now from when I applied to colleges, and it's anecdotal, but coming from a middle class family with a 4.0 GPA, I didn't qualify for financial aid at most of the colleges I looked at. I could get some merit based scholarship money, but not enough to make a significant dent in tuition, much less total cost (including food and housing). My parents' income was too high for me to qualify for financial aid, but they didn't have enough money to afford for me to go to the colleges I wanted either, and even if they could, they wanted me to pay for college myself. As a result, I ended up going to a much cheaper, less prestigious college, rather than the more prestigious ones I initially wanted, in order to avoid mountains of student debt.
I think it depends a lot on the family’s position within the middle class. Upper middle class families will not be eligible for financial aid, while members of the lower middle class have significant non-merit based aid available.
The only people who pay sticker price are international students. I don't know if we can say American higher education is subsidized mostly by people from third world, taking massive loans, usually half of or almost all of their family's net worth!
The actual shocking costs are buried well below the top line as services and facilities that you'd expect to be paid through tuition are separately charged but mandatory fees.
Its been well known for 50 years that poor students with good grades get pretty much full rides to top tier schools due to scholarships.
Behold Simpsons Paradox. The question isn’t “are people paying more or less out of pocket”. The question is “how much is the school I want to go to going to cost me”. Perhaps costs are “down” because people can’t attend the good schools they got into and they’re choosing to go to lesser schools. The author would have you believe this is a good thing!
The school I went to and the degree I earned in 2007 costs more than 3x today what it cost me then. But yeah sure go ahead and tell me the real price is going down.
What an imbecile.
Depends on the state. When I was in college, California community college was very affordable, but when I transferred to a Wisconsin school to get a 4-year degree, I learned there that WI community colleges charged the same price per credit hour as UW. Things may have changed since then, but at that time, if you lived in WI, you may as well go to a UW if you can get accepted, cause a community college wouldn't save you money.
Assuming wanting to work at big tech is a goal, I'm not aware of any of the big tech companies recruiting for entry level roles outside of colleges. The "boot camp"/"hire anyone with a pulse" period was a ZIRP era anomaly.
you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college.
not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.
I believe it's this point of view that leads to the common perception of higher education among the actual working class - that the American college experience was once something great, but got so watered down in pursuit of ideals other than education that it has essentially turned into a big summer camp for the adolscent offspring of the rich to extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer, hopefully increasing their social credit score in the process, with actual learning being a "nice to have" along the way.
What was all this student loan forgiveness talk about then? Scholarships apparently haven't been cutting it, otherwise there wouldn't be a trillion plus of outstanding student loan debt.
Maybe
> Is it really important for their kids future to go to a top 70 instead of 130?
There are definitely rough cutoffs. Using your ballpark thresholds, yes, there can be a big difference in 70ish and 130ish in terms of opportunities. The big issue is whether the student will avail themselves of these opportunities.
> (I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money)
Oh, definitely not true unless the student avails themselves of the available opportunities.
At top 5, it’s only worth the money (assuming that you’re price sensitive) if the student does one or more things like uses the school alumni network, develops a robust network in school, works with top tier researchers, accesses unique learning opportunities, goes into fields that only pull from these schools (e.g., investment banking, consulting, etc.), tapping into the varsity athlete network, and other things like that.
If they just go and get a degree and then do whatever they were going to do if they had gone to State U, then it’s wasted money.
The classroom education at the top 5 universities is largely not that good. Smaller liberal arts colleges do a better job of classroom education, imho, if thats what someone is looking for.
> Is this based on college being a good time in their life and they are projecting that experience?
Maybe.
There’s probably a lot of intuitively knowing that it’s better to go to a good school without necessarily knowing what about going to a good school makes it matter.
> The attitude of my parents is to make sure the degree will lead to a job, and then find a local and cheap school to get that credential.
Smart, but very limiting if you have ambitions beyond being a middle manager.
> I believe there may be taboo class issues around this topic that are not vocalized.
Class issues, yes. Taboo… I’m not so sure.
I was imagining it in personal terms. I would have paid any amount of money for myself because I believe it would have worked for the reasons you mentioned.
> knowing that it’s better to go to a good school without…
That’s likely.
> but very limiting if you have ambitions beyond being a middle manager.
Say more. That kind of thing sounds worth paying for.
> Taboo
For example, someone might secretly think state school education was a waste of time, but not want to talk bad about their peer’s schooling. Or want their child to socialize with other well-to-do families.
- All universities and even community colleges are equally good, except for maybe the Ivey league schools they’ve heard about, but no one actually goes to those.
- All majors are equally good, except whatever makes you a doctor, which is the best.
- Colleges on the east and west coast are very bad because they are purely for liberal indoctrination
- The highest earning career path from college is becoming a doctor, and if you become a doctor you are very upper class.
- what is majoring in finance? Is that like being a bank teller?
- what is studying computer science? Is that like working at Best Buy?
Once I got to college and met what I now think of as “the American urban professional class” I found a completely different set of beliefs, where college rankings were do-or-die, everyone wants their kid to go into finance, consulting, or tech, or get an MBA, and everyone seems to inherit large corporate networks from their parents.
I’m sure this has all sorts of culture war implications. I know the politics of the community I grew up in has more to do with distrusting/disliking the urban professional class than any wholistic political ideology. Probably both groups should learn something from each other.
I think academic prestige is best understood as a safety net. It won't guarantee success, because nothing can, but it can do a decent job preventing failure. In that respect the parents are right. Academic assistance is a way they can convert financial resources into something that can't be taken away from their children (and isn't subject to the gift tax limit).
That said it's easy to go overboard, and many do. Unless you want to work in a small number of careers that have target lists of schools they recruit from (which again is because the credential is a selling point to clients, not because the education is better), there is no difference between a public university and a prestigious one.
To the extent parents know that prestige is signalling all the way down, and does not imply being better at what you do or knowing more about your subject, they do have some inside perspective compared to the population at large.
I'm not sure which is the best for career success and it's incredibly difficult to quantify your parents network effect, but conscientiousness, intelligence and grit make for a very happy life. You'll naturally gravitate toward intellectually stimulating things, work hard at them, not care about meaningless things around you, and enjoy every minute of it.
This is a really good summary. The end result is a permanent, non-transferable, protection with strong resistance to “inflation”.
> they do have some inside perspective compared to the population at large.
Would that advantage manifest as playing into the system - looking for opportunities for signaling? Or discounting - finding good education with less signaling value.
Is it, though? Of course people who go to Harvard et al. do well afterwards, but many of them came from wealthy families and were bound to do well no matter what. If you’re poor, Harvard [1] is less likely to make you rich than UC Riverside [2].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
There is the "overall mobility" metric that favors UC Riverside, but the way that's being measured would seem to skew in favor of whichever college has students in lower quintiles (a top quintile kid can't move up 2 quintiles).
I'm guessing a lot of people (especially those without an university education) look at how impressive the buildings and facilities are because those are the status signals they understand. I don't think many check how large percentage of lessons are run by assistants.
So too many US colleges end up being 80% overly expensive hotel and 20% education.
The push into college is kinda the last hurrah for parents to set their kids up. Taking it seriously helps the (soon to be adult) kids take it seriously, finding a good fit can have an outsized impact on what they do next.
I do wish we lived in a world where we could be both involved and supportive of future endeavors. I grew up in a lower middle class home. College involved atrocious debt while my parents were uninvolved as … they were still busy working.
Why can’t we have time for ourselves in society?
Americans love to root for teams and build their identities around what teams they are on. In sports, in politics, in college selection, even which state or city they are from. College selection is just an easy way to buy yourself into a team.
These are otherwise shrewd people.
In my state our state college actually has agreements with number of community colleges where they guarantee transfer once you complete pre-defined number of classes with reasonably good GPA (3.5 I believe). Saves you a TON.
I'm curious to know how to find other scholarships not necessarily advertised by the school. I read the "1000 scholarships" book or whatever it's called, their points weren't very practical, or maybe I didn't look hard enough...
100% for liberal arts colleges. I do not hate liberal arts education, but if you charge so much for education knowing there's very limited number of jobs your graduates will be fighting for, and how low their wages will be, that borders on scam.
One of the biggest things to keep an eye out for is scholarship opportunities from local organizations (i.e., scholarships whose eligibility is "open to all students who graduated from high school in ABC County"). The key bonus here is that the local eligibility restrictions mean you're competing with a relatively limited pool of applicants. Of course this bonus is lessened if you come from a big city, although on the flip side bigger cities are more likely to have more foundations offering such scholarships. In my experience many people tend to look for scholarships at the school they're going to, and they look at ones you can find in the "1000 scholarships" type books which tend to be large national ones, but they're not so aware of scholarships that are based on where you're coming from, not where you're going to.
These scholarships often aren't huge dollar amounts, but if you combine it with the advice about picking affordable schools, it can have a meaningful impact.
The rest of the advice is excellent, as well. Unless the world is very, very different ~15 years from now (and God, I hope it is), this is what I'll be telling my kid.
* Never under any circumstances go to a for-profit college.
> One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more.
When looking at universities, when I saw a high sticker price, I ignored that university, even if in hindsight I had a good chance of being accepted.
I wish I had had someone when I was young who encouraged me to have broader horizons.
My parents also told me college doesn't matter, just the degree (which was their way of saving money). Not that they paid a dime anyways, they just always felt comfortable lying to me if it saved them any amount of trouble.
Our state school does not have much merit scholarships (and I'm not talking about $500 per year for 4.0 GPA/1500+ SAT, which is not even available to all applicants, that's just insulting). There are colleges which are definitely in the bottom of the rankings where you can get in with 0 tuition or even full ride (no tuition+free room and board) AND you can get some stipend thrown on top. I now have a choice: pay $45K (tuition with room and board) per year for my very academically strong kids at my (reasonably good) state school or $0 at the likes of Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, and to a smaller extent Arizona and Texas (well the last ones would not be free, but at least less than half of the state uni). What do you think I will encourage my kids to do???
If you got lucky you got a junior dev or QA position at a small dev shop. Unless you were some kind of known prodigy no one got a FAANG job out of highschool with no degree or experience.
Instead, I went to a school that was in my home town. I learned things when I went to college, but that school was objectively the wrong choice. Not only did it cost double what the state school would have cost[0], I missed out on the reason young people ought to go to college in the first place: a once in a lifetime chance to spend 4 years hanging out and making friends with high achieving people who would go on to shape the face of the world.
Granted, one of my college friends ended up as a senior researcher studying cancer, and another went on to work for Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure in my class of ~300, there weren't too many CTOs, VPEs, star researchers, etc. Simply going to a bigger school would have been a better choice; going to a school that was both bigger and better than my undergrad institution would have been the best choice.
I guess that's what you get when society expects a 17-year-old to make what may be the single most impactful life choice they'll ever have. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
That said, going to a small liberal arts college had its advantages. I learned a lot. Some of that stuff I learned, I've even gotten to use once or twice. But, looking back, if I could send my past self a message back in time, I'd tell me to go somewhere else. I may not have been much better off financially if I had met someone in college at 20 who talked me into partnering up on some insane business venture or something, but that experience would have been priceless.
--
[0]: This was even after I got a scholarship that reduced my estimated family contribution to 2/3 of what the sticker price was, on top of being able to stay at home and save money that way.
We're looking at Alabama at this point, either Tuscaloosa or Huntsville, I think they're even less known/lower ranked but not that bad for aerospace. That'd likely be full ride (national merit semifinalist or finalist).
The advice about lowering income is valid. I don't even have to do anything the shitty IT jobs market took care of that for me :(
Where do you get that? Federal loans are currently 6.5% for undergraduate, 8-something% for graduate. Private loans are higher than that.
And the current prime rate is 7.5%.
I retract my previous comment. Thank you.
Luckily, software jobs in the beginning of my career was a strong market, so I aggressively paid them off early into the pandemic. About 3-4 years post grad. But I know that's not the normal story.
I’m not sure what you have in mind.
I’m assuming “get a local and cheap degree that gets you a job” means going to a community college and a directional school (at best).
The whole mentality behind this thinking is “I’m going to be the best worker bee I can be”. Worker bees cap out at middle management. When you go to schools like this, you are surrounded by future worker bees, that will probably be your mentality, and that will almost certainly be your social circle. It’s hard to escape worker bee status in that context — possible, just hard and not probable.
Note that there isn’t anything wrong with being a worker bee. The world needs a lot of them.
Upper management, owners of big businesses, politicians, etc. are thinking about how to utilize worker bees to accomplish goals grander than “getting a good job”. It’s a very different way of thinking. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s foreign to most people who aren’t surrounded by it.
Note that I am not referring to a flagship state school, which usually produces the majority of your local and state leaders (see below).
As a side note, this worker bee phenomenon is in play at elite schools as well. The worker bees get “good jobs” as analysts at investment banks, entry level positions at consulting firms, or (later) associate positions at good law firms. They do their worker bee thing, make the principals a lot of money, and then plateau / wash-out mid-career when they realize that they don’t have the social capital it takes to be a rainmaker. Some folks adjust and do well for themselves, but others don’t.
So to address your comment about being “worth paying for”, it really boils down to a few things. Does the student already have a lot of social capital that they will be able to build on top of? If not, are they socially capable enough to do the things they need to do (mostly build social networks that will let facilitate them being rain makers and/or power brokers later in life)? This is a lot to ask of a kid who is not already part of the upper-middle class or higher (e.g., the capital class).
If a student is just going to go to college, play video games in their dorm room, maybe roll in the hay a bit, and be an average student with a mediocre degree, then paying for a top 5 school (or even a flagship state school) largely is not worth it, imho.
> For example, someone might secretly think state school education was a waste of time,
As long as the “state school” is the flagship school or the A&M school, then this would not be a smart thing to think. Exceptions exist (e.g., UCLA), but these are largely known schools.
It all gets back to how the student utilizes the opportunities presented to them.
> but not want to talk bad about their peer’s schooling.
Probably a good idea in general.
> Or want their child to socialize with other well-to-do families.
Well, this is a smart move for building and/or maintaining social status.
That said, outside of the northeast corridor and California, the state flagship school probably produces waaaay more local and state leaders (business, political, etc.) than top 5 schools. I’ve definitely heard of people having limited access to their state power scene because they went to an Ivy instead of making the right connections at State U.
Edit:
Note that there are other scenarios that make elite schools good.
If you want to become an academic/researcher (I suggest not doing this unless you know someone who will give you the “inside baseball” version of being an academic), the elite schools give folks advantages that state schools don’t.
If you are in a STEM field and you want to meet other super smart and super motivated folks to work with in STEM later, then elite schools can be a good deal. But again, we are back to social networking.
If you want to go to an elite law school or certain grad schools, I actually recommend most people go to State U. For most majors, the effort required to be middle of the pack at an elite school will put you at the top of State U. A super high gpa and recs saying that you’re one of their 1%er students ever are worth way more than being merely above average (e.g., 70th percentile) in a pool of very motivated and intelligent people.
It’s rough listening to folks at Ivy graduations who busted their butt to get into an Ivy and do well (but not top of their class) moan about how they are ending up at the same good-but-not-great law school as their buddy who had zero stress before and during college. Note that the Ivy grad may be better prepared for law school (maybe), but one has to wonder if the stress, money, and effort were worth it.
Do you have examples? I haven't gone systematically digging into this, but the general impression I've gotten is that this sort of explicit demographic filters are largely associated with the "equity" crowd rather than the "merit" crowd.
Extending the party of youth is roughly one of the benefits of social welfare. When we took the children out of the factories in the 1920s, we extended their youth. When we sent them to college, we extended their youth. When we economically constrained them with high real estate prices, we extended their youth.
Extending youthhood is fine, so long as we do it appropriately. For example, if we did it right, someone entering retirement enters a new youthhood of carefreeness. If we do it wrong, someone enters youthhood in theirs 20s as a dependent of their parents. There's a lot of wrong versions of the last thing I said, where people are kept children in academia to be parented indefinitely by tenor.
It's delicate. We want to provide as much youthhood as possible in a good way, if we can.
As to your first point, you can only be speaking of white men. To this I'll say, white men that come from the same economic situation should have access to the same scholarships. That's a easy one to fix. If you are working class then you are working class, this life is hard enough already.
1. Colleges set exorbitantly high prices.
2. The government-supported system assesses families' ability to pay though FAFSA process, where you submit your tax returns (not that you have to, IRS is government as well) with your wage/business income, then list all your assets (minus retirement accounts such as 401Ks) and liabilities. Then the FAFSA spits out your expected contribution, TELLING you how much you can afford to pay for your kids education.
3. Colleges and government then use this number to determine how much "financial need" you have. They can "meet your financial need" by letting you pay less than the sticker price (it's called "need-based scholarship"), or allow to take loans on favorable terms to close the difference between the sticker price and your ability to pay (that they determined). More often it's a combination of the two (depending how desirable college is and how good of the student they perceive your kid to be).
Consider the quantity of people coming from outside the USA to study. It may be that foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling (except maybe for a flagship school?). Thus, they're also doing the damage to the USA's education market while not affecting their own domestic one.
Other countries typically regulate prices, preventing things from becoming expensive to begin with.
This applies to education, health care, housing, and more.
This is why Ivy League schools have endowments larger than the GDP of some micronations and are financially being run like hedge funds, while still simultaneously being supported with US taxpayer money. The progressive orthodoxy does not hold these institutions accountable for institutional greed and selfishness because of a shared cultural affinity between progressive politics and higher education, and because all of the negative externalities of the spiritual sins of selfishness and greed at institutional scale are forgiven for the virtue of being a nonprofit under the idiosyncratic, dogmatic priesthood of progressivism.
The US doesn't have progressives. We have conservatives and conservatives LARPing as progressives when it's financially convenient for them.
On a related note, this is also why Canada and the UK can make single-payer healthcare work and why the US can't. Some of those shadowy GOP dark money donors are the same faces that the public would associate with progressive thought leadership. They're following a Machiavellian playbook where they attempt to portray themselves as publicly virtuous while remaining the same soulless, greedy multimillionaires or billionaires that instinctively think from a place of unadulterated self interest behind the scenes.
The price signal is almost the other way around (the more expensive, the less likely it is to be a good place).
OK, but do you think these traits are primarily the results of nature, nurture, luck, or individual practice?
Good question! I think that can play out both ways, ultimately based on how wealthy the parents are. If money is no object, play the prestige game. If you are middle class and know the rules of the game, maximize value.
For example, I am acquainted with parents who are teachers at a prestigious private school. Their child attended said school because of subsidized tuition, and then attended college in an honors program at a state university in the middle of the country. He was paid to attend! The parents are fully abreast of all the studies on the effects of education, both being teachers and being in the middle of the college admissions frenzy that goes on in these schools. So they know how the game works, and they are playing it to the max for value.
On the other hand, at this school are children from generational wealth who play obscure sports from an early age to give them an edge in admissions. The children never need to actually earn a living, and the target school admission is seen as a defense of a family legacy and bragging rights for the parents - pure prestige.
> children from generational wealth who play obscure sports from an early age to give them an edge in admissions
Now, some schools will give you more educational opportunities and better education, but honestly? The margins aren't that huge.
They do give you a better start in your career. You have ability to participate in research/development activities alongside with your professors who are leading experts in the industry, you create connections in the real world through the projects you participate in, and therefore you will have much more opportunities for a better start.
Many good companies (FAANG or whatever did/will replace them) recruit out of these schools. The likes of Deloitte, Google, all the 3-letter agencies do not recruit out of Iowa state, they only do top 20.
As you progress in your career it starts to matter less where you went (you can still tap your college connections many years later though), but if you managed to have a good start, your ceiling will be higher, too.
Even if you managed to graduate without much career prospects despite all the opportunities the school provided, you will still have the brand name on the resume which will make the recruiters and hiring managers to give you extra consideration.
Is this worth extra $100K debt you got to put yourself through Harvard? Not necessarily. But it might be.
Test 1: If a resume showed up from Stanford CS, how likely would it be that you or your coworkers would completely ignore it without giving them a call?
Test 2: if you had an employee with Stanford CS how likely would it be that your coworkers would ever mention that individual having that degree?
#2 degree basically never comes up, except if someone is saying they had an atypical degree path. And institution? Never, unless it's a part of someone's identity and they are a big "I am a college team guy"
The point is that there is no other alternative. My observation, at least in tech - is that the expectation of greater than 40 hours of work per week is ever present. There is no choice to earn less, take it easy, and have more time for other pursuits. If both parents are under this expectation then there are fewer hours to be involved. A break of 1-2 years will be held against you in future interviews.
From talking with other parents, this is a common conundrum across industries. No one feels that they have enough time to be a good parent.
More concretely, what work arrangements do you have or are aware of which allow you to cap the hours worked while affording a livable home life?
There is no choice to go to your boss and say “hey I want to work 20 hours, can you cut my salary in half and keep my benefits”?
This misunderstands your value as an employee (linear function of time at the office) and signals you aren’t really interested in the project.
However there absolutely are companies, and roles within the company, where you can work much less than 40 hours - you just can’t explicitly ask for it.
> A break of 1-2 years
Yeah another example that won’t work.
So the AP as a means of saving $$$ loophole has been hard closed.
And in hindsight of course that's how it works, both because the university isn't keen on cost savings but also because every student is coming loaded with APs. AP physics isn't "college physics" anymore it's just high school physics and the optional prereq to Physics 101.
Then I took in person classes at 18/19, fixed my GPA and generally did well. The only classes I really struggled with was Japanese and later French.
With Japanese I pissed my Korean girlfriend off, and had to drop it. French I took for a pass/no pass and absolutely failed.
You absolutely can get a BA by 20, but I'd be more interested in WHY you'd want to speed run academia. Sounds really stressful...
See how you called it "prestigious" not "expensive", and "middling" not "cheap"? Price contributes to the feeling of quality of any product but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. There's more than that just the price.
The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards. Even the language is part of the cycle which fuels this talent attraction. This brings results, the results bring prestige, and the prestige brings in more talent.
An expensive school in Bulgaria will not attract that kind of talent because fewer people are attracted to living, working, or learning the local language there. Heck, even a no-name US school couldn't attract talent by jacking up prices.
The US is an educational powerhouse, and we attract top talent, sometimes charge money to educate these visitors (undergraduate and graduate work quite differently), and then, wait for it, we kick the people we educated back out.
Seriously, check out the visa types linked from here:
https://educationusa.state.gov/foreign-institutions-and-gove...
I don’t know the history, but if I was in charge of a non-US country trying to import skills, maximize my country’s future success, and even slowly weaken the US, I would love these rules. If I were a US lawmaker, I would struggle to invent a more self-destructive, not to mention inhumane, policy.
So, in answer to your comment, no, our educational system is crap at retaining the top talent it attracts, because the US made it mostly illegal for that talent to stay here.
Even if you have all the money in the world, US high school standards are very low. With some affinity for reading and access to the internet, one can be learning at a far quicker rate, even without sacrificing social life outside of school.
Many kids in the US already do this via Advanced Placement testing, but some states also allow high school students to take college courses.
1. You want or need to be making money instead of spending it.
Eg, no family wealth involved; you’re paying for everything yourself
2. You don’t enjoy the high pressure (ish), test-driven environment and want to be doing more meaningful work.
Etc. The number of people who don’t want to spend money and time in college might surprise you. I even know some very academically successful ones with this attitude.