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I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone. I understand this as a s

I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone. I understand this as a separate point from college being unattainably expensive, but it is an important point. I have friends who would be mechanics, Peace Corps volunteers, electricians, or plumbers if they hadn't instead gone to a private 4-year institution, pressured to attend the best schools possible because they did well in high school. The permanent solution for this is either adjusted student loans or free community colleges, or some combination of the two. People on the opposite side of this issue I've talked to have often expressed concern that the bachelor's degree will basically become devalued if everyone has access. My response is always "it already IS devalued, but hardly anyone has access". It's near impossible to get a job in a desirable field without a college degree and relevant experience, but it's also prohibitively expensive to get a degree. Where will the 22 year olds with $100,000 worth of debt working at McDonald's going to be in 30-50 years? I have friends who in their early 20s are recognizing it's worth accruing more debt at even higher education in hopes of getting a job that will make the investment worth it. > Unless we make college affordable for people of all financial means, opportunity through higher education will be a false promise. But this is half of it, right? Plenty of people who walk out of colleges with no debt still can't find a job because the market is changing so much. As today's jobs move towards automation, I think most here can agree that current careers will change forever (frequently on HN the conversation steers towards more technological jobs). What I don't frequently see posted here is that automation will free up creative jobs where going to college is a necessary path. Writers exposed to other young writers can become inspired for life, especially given the opportunities. This turned into sort of a soapbox and is mostly anecdotal, but I think most would agree a national conversation needs to be had about this.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
peterkshultz 10y ago
A big proponent of the type of things you're talking about is Mike Rowe. He created a foundation "that rewards people with a passion to get trained for skilled jobs that actually exist": http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/
brianlweiner 10y ago
I don't think Peace Corp really encourages non college grads from joining, and I'd strongly discourage any 18 year old from signing up.
- jamesroseman 10y ago
  Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear. I had intended to say they'd be in the Peace Corps if they didn't have to deal with so much debt in the now. I re-read my post and see how murky that meaning is, sorry.
intopieces 10y ago
>I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone. That's the problem, not the solution. College should be for everyone. There's no reason why a person who becomes a plumber or peace corps volunteer or electrician can't also go to college and learn those things, among other topics. In 2015, only 33% of American adults had a college degree [0]. American adults are not over-educated, they're just over-charged for their education. [0]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
- rguzman 10y ago
  College != Education. Education should be for anyone who wants it. However, the returns on a college education (especially if the monetary costs are high) are highly dependent on the abilities (IQ, grit, conscientiousness, etc) of the individual in question. It is a bad investment for a lot of people.
- rayiner 10y ago
  College is a waste of time and money for almost everyone who attends . In the 1960's, less than 10% of Americans had college degrees. Yet, we still had engineers and accountants and insurance adjusters, etc. Very few people, even white collar workers, learn anything essential in college. The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste.
  - throwawaysocks 10y ago
    > The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste. Hanlon begs that we consider the possibility that a pedestrian understanding of basic statistics and market forces are the more likely culprit for public perception. Aside, you've also picked the wrong boogeyman. Outside of the elite institutions, where the .01% of rock-star professors MAYBE make as much as a typical software developer at a top software firm, professors come in nowhere near upper-middle class. At typical institutions, they make mid-5 figures, have no upward mobility in their professions, and are a favorite target for pot shots and threats of funding cuts because everyone loves to hate them. In all, it's a pretty unappealing job outside of the social capital with traditional types and the carrot of tenure (which isn't nearly as permanent as it's often perceived). The financial industry and university managers that are benefiting from peddling of useless college degrees, not professors.
deleted 10y ago
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bpchaps 10y ago
Absolutely. Most of those my age who didn't go into tech and got 'regular' jobs are absolutely filled to the brim with debt with zero way out. Those here in Chicago who have tech jobs aren't able to find jobs that match their skill. My highschool was mostly in the lower/lower-middle class range with upper-middle in honor's programs. Multiple times per year, they gave presentations about the absolute, unwavering importance of a college education with money rather than success as the reason to go. Just about every student I've talked to who actually went through it is absolutely miserable - especially those who went to a university rather than the local community college. The only people who didn't have this issue were the honor's students, who either received scholarships or had money already. I seriously question the judgement, noise and in some ways, misery caused by those presentations. Every time career comes up with my family and old classmates, I'm still looked down on for not having a degree... Even though I'm objectively more successful than the people telling me to go to college.. The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  Well as much as I appreciate your earlier points, I do want to comment: > The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias. That it's you who's showing survivor-bias. The data as far as I'm aware of it, does indeed confirm, that a college degree is a net financial benefit, despite of course obvious substantial anecdotal evidence to the contrary that every person is familiar with (my friend xyz got a degree and he's doing shitty). I'm purely talking historically, and financially. Even today I'm seeing a job market where you can't get a traineeship in most companies without a master's degree, as silly as that may be. Also I want to stress that tech is very, very much an exception. A field where more than most, you can get access to jobs on the basis of your work, not your work in school. I feel HN underappreciates the difference with the rest of the population. In terms of happiness, fulfilment etc, I can't speak on that. Also, I can't speak on how this'll develop in next generations, e.g. for those going to college today or later this decade, but I suspect like most that there'll be a big paradigm shift making college way less appealing. At the end of the day, the benefits of college can be seen as an arbitrage opportunity in the market. i.e., spend X money for education, get Y (which is > X) benefits in income in return. And like any arbitrage opportunity, X will increase in cost and Y will decrease, as more people are drawn to the opportunity, until it largely fades. (or worse, temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).
throwawaysocks 10y ago
> I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone The idea that this stigma exists is mostly a conservative pundit talking point used to justify cutting education budgets. If you look at labor market data, it's unsubstantiated. And if you visit middle America, you'll find plenty of people with disdain for college degrees. The United States doesn't have an over-abundance of people with tertiary degrees. The USA in the bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds, less than half of whom obtained ANY form of post-highschool education -- including community college. More importantly, many high-growth fields are also high-tech and require tertiary education or exceptional self-teaching. The problem isn't an over-supply of college educated workers. Rather, the problem is an unwillingness to subsidize tertiary education together with the misconception that college without accompanying training in employable skills is a worthwhile investment.
- niftich 10y ago
  What do tertiary degrees get you? If you're an employer, why would you want to employ these people?
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    Most notably computational finance and research in the natural sciences (material, biochem, physics) all require tertiary degrees since those courses are simply not available at the undergraduate level. The benefits of hiring these people by the financial and the pharma sector should be obvious.
    - throwawaysocks 10y ago
      It sounds like you've confused tertiary with post-graduate. Tertiary typically means post-secondary. Secondary typically means US high school or equivalent. (from wiki: " The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers.[1]") So the electrician with a CC degree has a tertiary education. Of course, so does the Ph.D. Hopefully that clarifies the magnitude of the fact that fewer than 1/2 of young Americans obtained a tertiary degree...
IkmoIkmo 10y ago
It's not even that college isn't for everyone because there's jobs like plumbing for which you don't need a bachelor's degree for work, or to obtain the job. It's that there's jobs like credit analyst which require a degree to obtain, which absolutely, do not, at all, require a degree. It's mostly the latter that is so insane to me, and the solution isn't for kids to recognise they don't need the degree. Because if employers ask for one, even though it's stupid, they have little choice but to accept the system. (and no, not everyone can just start their own company and beat the system). I have friends who have credit analyst jobs, they're literally on the phone contacting clients to pay back their debt if they forgot, and propose a payback plan if they have issues paying. That's about it. The title is one where you expect an undergrad degree and employers require one most of the time, but by age 16 most people have the competencies, safe for the deep voice and calm professional phone demeanour, to do this job. And that scares me most. These degrees cost $30-50k, and they're useless, yet required. That really has to change. The key point is this: A degree should be a proxy for competence and skills particular to the job. i.e. you studied marketing, so let's hire you for a marketing job because you've got the skills. But what a degree really is to employers, is a proxy for ambition, young-urban-professional normalcy, perhaps some level of a proxy for ethnicity or at least congeniality (oh, this employee will be like me, has a wife, kids, normal life, is dependable, not volatile etc), a proxy for a person valuing the long-term etc. i.e., oh you studied marketing, let's hire you for an unrelated job requiring no skills, because this degree is an easy first-order way to filter out the type of people we don't want to hire. And that's bs, because it treats education as a giant money-wasting institution for employers to weed out those who aren't keen on following the system, or who see through it. That's NOT what education should be about and it's a travesty. Almost all my peers who went to uni didn't give a rats ass about learning as part of their formal uni education, it was simply not a part of their decision making process for university. Despite that, they're all curious, interesting individuals, who learn in their own time about their particular interests. That's really sad. And that concerns me. Students choosing to pursue a skilled career over plumbing is another concern, but not nearly as significant for me (and in some cases not a concern at all).
scelerat 10y ago
Another piece of the problem, at least in the US, is the that a high school diploma, the highest degree attainable by purely public funding, is a certification of only the barest level of competency in communication and arithmetic. The requirement for "BA or equivalent" in so many situations isn't because that position requires four years of advanced study; it's because four years of advanced study usually means a candidate can at least express themselves well in writing, think critically and do long division.
- nitwit005 10y ago
  There is a constant pressure to push down the standard of a high school diploma. It feels so bad for people to see students try and fail, and there is the usual pressure from the parents of special needs kids. My personal feeling is we should give everyone a diploma, but list some sort of grade level attainment. If nothing else, it would help universities place students into the remedial classes they sometimes need.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

peterkshultz 10y ago

A big proponent of the type of things you're talking about is Mike Rowe. He created a foundation "that rewards people with a passion to get trained for skilled jobs that actually exist": http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

brianlweiner 10y ago

I don't think Peace Corp really encourages non college grads from joining, and I'd strongly discourage any 18 year old from signing up.

jamesroseman 10y ago
Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear. I had intended to say they'd be in the Peace Corps if they didn't have to deal with so much debt in the now. I re-read my post and see how murky that meaning is, sorry.

intopieces 10y ago

>I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone. That's the problem, not the solution. College should be for everyone. There's no reason why a person who becomes a plumber or peace corps volunteer or electrician can't also go to college and learn those things, among other topics. In 2015, only 33% of American adults had a college degree [0]. American adults are not over-educated, they're just over-charged for their education. [0]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

rguzman 10y ago
College != Education. Education should be for anyone who wants it. However, the returns on a college education (especially if the monetary costs are high) are highly dependent on the abilities (IQ, grit, conscientiousness, etc) of the individual in question. It is a bad investment for a lot of people.
rayiner 10y ago
College is a waste of time and money for almost everyone who attends . In the 1960's, less than 10% of Americans had college degrees. Yet, we still had engineers and accountants and insurance adjusters, etc. Very few people, even white collar workers, learn anything essential in college. The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste.
- throwawaysocks 10y ago
  > The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste. Hanlon begs that we consider the possibility that a pedestrian understanding of basic statistics and market forces are the more likely culprit for public perception. Aside, you've also picked the wrong boogeyman. Outside of the elite institutions, where the .01% of rock-star professors MAYBE make as much as a typical software developer at a top software firm, professors come in nowhere near upper-middle class. At typical institutions, they make mid-5 figures, have no upward mobility in their professions, and are a favorite target for pot shots and threats of funding cuts because everyone loves to hate them. In all, it's a pretty unappealing job outside of the social capital with traditional types and the carrot of tenure (which isn't nearly as permanent as it's often perceived). The financial industry and university managers that are benefiting from peddling of useless college degrees, not professors.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bpchaps 10y ago

Absolutely. Most of those my age who didn't go into tech and got 'regular' jobs are absolutely filled to the brim with debt with zero way out. Those here in Chicago who have tech jobs aren't able to find jobs that match their skill. My highschool was mostly in the lower/lower-middle class range with upper-middle in honor's programs. Multiple times per year, they gave presentations about the absolute, unwavering importance of a college education with money rather than success as the reason to go. Just about every student I've talked to who actually went through it is absolutely miserable - especially those who went to a university rather than the local community college. The only people who didn't have this issue were the honor's students, who either received scholarships or had money already. I seriously question the judgement, noise and in some ways, misery caused by those presentations. Every time career comes up with my family and old classmates, I'm still looked down on for not having a degree... Even though I'm objectively more successful than the people telling me to go to college.. The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.

IkmoIkmo 10y ago
Well as much as I appreciate your earlier points, I do want to comment: > The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias. That it's you who's showing survivor-bias. The data as far as I'm aware of it, does indeed confirm, that a college degree is a net financial benefit, despite of course obvious substantial anecdotal evidence to the contrary that every person is familiar with (my friend xyz got a degree and he's doing shitty). I'm purely talking historically, and financially. Even today I'm seeing a job market where you can't get a traineeship in most companies without a master's degree, as silly as that may be. Also I want to stress that tech is very, very much an exception. A field where more than most, you can get access to jobs on the basis of your work, not your work in school. I feel HN underappreciates the difference with the rest of the population. In terms of happiness, fulfilment etc, I can't speak on that. Also, I can't speak on how this'll develop in next generations, e.g. for those going to college today or later this decade, but I suspect like most that there'll be a big paradigm shift making college way less appealing. At the end of the day, the benefits of college can be seen as an arbitrage opportunity in the market. i.e., spend X money for education, get Y (which is > X) benefits in income in return. And like any arbitrage opportunity, X will increase in cost and Y will decrease, as more people are drawn to the opportunity, until it largely fades. (or worse, temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).

throwawaysocks 10y ago

> I think a reality that will hopefully soon catch up with societal stigma in the United States is that college isn't right for everyone The idea that this stigma exists is mostly a conservative pundit talking point used to justify cutting education budgets. If you look at labor market data, it's unsubstantiated. And if you visit middle America, you'll find plenty of people with disdain for college degrees. The United States doesn't have an over-abundance of people with tertiary degrees. The USA in the bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds, less than half of whom obtained ANY form of post-highschool education -- including community college. More importantly, many high-growth fields are also high-tech and require tertiary education or exceptional self-teaching. The problem isn't an over-supply of college educated workers. Rather, the problem is an unwillingness to subsidize tertiary education together with the misconception that college without accompanying training in employable skills is a worthwhile investment.

niftich 10y ago
What do tertiary degrees get you? If you're an employer, why would you want to employ these people?
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Most notably computational finance and research in the natural sciences (material, biochem, physics) all require tertiary degrees since those courses are simply not available at the undergraduate level. The benefits of hiring these people by the financial and the pharma sector should be obvious.
  - throwawaysocks 10y ago
    It sounds like you've confused tertiary with post-graduate. Tertiary typically means post-secondary. Secondary typically means US high school or equivalent. (from wiki: " The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers.[1]") So the electrician with a CC degree has a tertiary education. Of course, so does the Ph.D. Hopefully that clarifies the magnitude of the fact that fewer than 1/2 of young Americans obtained a tertiary degree...

IkmoIkmo 10y ago

It's not even that college isn't for everyone because there's jobs like plumbing for which you don't need a bachelor's degree for work, or to obtain the job. It's that there's jobs like credit analyst which require a degree to obtain, which absolutely, do not, at all, require a degree. It's mostly the latter that is so insane to me, and the solution isn't for kids to recognise they don't need the degree. Because if employers ask for one, even though it's stupid, they have little choice but to accept the system. (and no, not everyone can just start their own company and beat the system). I have friends who have credit analyst jobs, they're literally on the phone contacting clients to pay back their debt if they forgot, and propose a payback plan if they have issues paying. That's about it. The title is one where you expect an undergrad degree and employers require one most of the time, but by age 16 most people have the competencies, safe for the deep voice and calm professional phone demeanour, to do this job. And that scares me most. These degrees cost $30-50k, and they're useless, yet required. That really has to change. The key point is this: A degree should be a proxy for competence and skills particular to the job. i.e. you studied marketing, so let's hire you for a marketing job because you've got the skills. But what a degree really is to employers, is a proxy for ambition, young-urban-professional normalcy, perhaps some level of a proxy for ethnicity or at least congeniality (oh, this employee will be like me, has a wife, kids, normal life, is dependable, not volatile etc), a proxy for a person valuing the long-term etc. i.e., oh you studied marketing, let's hire you for an unrelated job requiring no skills, because this degree is an easy first-order way to filter out the type of people we don't want to hire. And that's bs, because it treats education as a giant money-wasting institution for employers to weed out those who aren't keen on following the system, or who see through it. That's NOT what education should be about and it's a travesty. Almost all my peers who went to uni didn't give a rats ass about learning as part of their formal uni education, it was simply not a part of their decision making process for university. Despite that, they're all curious, interesting individuals, who learn in their own time about their particular interests. That's really sad. And that concerns me. Students choosing to pursue a skilled career over plumbing is another concern, but not nearly as significant for me (and in some cases not a concern at all).

scelerat 10y ago

Another piece of the problem, at least in the US, is the that a high school diploma, the highest degree attainable by purely public funding, is a certification of only the barest level of competency in communication and arithmetic. The requirement for "BA or equivalent" in so many situations isn't because that position requires four years of advanced study; it's because four years of advanced study usually means a candidate can at least express themselves well in writing, think critically and do long division.

nitwit005 10y ago
There is a constant pressure to push down the standard of a high school diploma. It feels so bad for people to see students try and fail, and there is the usual pressure from the parents of special needs kids. My personal feeling is we should give everyone a diploma, but list some sort of grade level attainment. If nothing else, it would help universities place students into the remedial classes they sometimes need.