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I think a lot of people are looking at this as "maybe this article is offering advice" instead, the way I'm looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantific

I think a lot of people are looking at this as "maybe this article is offering advice" instead, the way I'm looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantification of what we all know intuitively: that college is so expensive it's reaching a natural ceiling. The way this manifests in reality isn't millions of people all doing a cost/benefit calculus like this and coming to the rational conclusion they can skip college. What happens is that slowly, the meme that "Jim went to college and he doesn't seem better off" seeps into the collective consciousness. More and more people start running into this evidence, and reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to send their kids to college, and the upward pressure on college tuition starts to lessen. After a while this meme that college is a tradeoff becomes well established, and it becomes common knowledge that you think hard about it before you send your kid to college. The underlying reason is something like "You can make a better return in principle investing in the S&P" but the way it becomes a force in the real world is by a collective bayesian reasoning process we all engage in as a society.

rubber_duck 9y ago
Going to college is not really a cost benefit calculation - there are plenty of degrees with low job market demand and a lot of them are popular. Part of the reason why there is such pressure on the prices, sort of like palliative care vs. spare no expense for the aging population drives up medical prices.
- white-flame 9y ago
  Just picking apart a few nits: Medical care is part of survival. Going to a university for job training is part of survival (and as an aside, I think it's an inappropriate use of academia in the long view). But going to a university for life betterment, intellectual pursuit, or even just ego is a luxury. So there's no real price pressure on the latter, only the former. I would say that just having the magic paper is what low market demand degree pursuers want, regardless of the major. But that means the paper itself has high market demand, even if the actual field of study doesn't, so it still comes down to cost-benefit calculations. The reason they chose that specific degree is to lower the exertion cost of the beneficial degree.
twotwotwo 9y ago
And college got expensive partly through policy choices. Offering easy loans tends to make people price insensitive, so tuitions go up and a lot of that money goes to things like increasingly fancy buildings and making textbook publishers' shareholders rich. Meanwhile often less is going to state schools that, with low in-state tuitions, were historically a way up for a lot of people. (An older friend went to Berkeley a few decades ago for under $1,000.) There's some comparison to the housing bubble, where policy also supported big loans. Don't have all the answers, but less emphasis on loans, competition from better-supported state and other non-profit schools, and having multiple forms of post-high-school education and credentialing available could all potentially help to bring some competition and sanity back to all this.
- jaggi1 9y ago
  This comment is likely to fetch downvotes because you are suggesting that government should not subsidize both.
- MrTonyD 9y ago
  I remember reading an article describing how college costs can be explained by an analysis of supply and demand. There have been a variety of historic reasons for demand rising at different times - mostly related to unemployment and lack of other economic choices. I keep hearing the meme that low-cost college is the cause of college expense - but college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    > I keep hearing the meme that low-cost college is the cause of college expense I think you've misunderstood what you're hearing: low cost college by definition can't be the cause of high cost college. The claim is that high availability of funds/liquidity for college is what pushes up prices,since there are more dollars available to chase a supply that hasn't kept pace[1]. > college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing. This doesn't really make any sense. Colleges that are provided for free are a lot less dependent on markets to determine prices: they treat them like a more or less generic public good (where college choice is determined by quality of student more than ability to pay). [1] strictly speaking, the supply hasn't been that constrained, but since college is largely perceived as a positional good, this affects all but the bottom rung for-profit colleges.
mquander 9y ago
That doesn't seem necessarily right. College is an investment of limited size that you can more or less make once per lifetime, and the market for it is about the furthest thing from an efficient or free one you could ever think of, with subsidies and regulations and externalities coming from every angle. It's not obvious that it might not persist as an "unreasonably" good or bad investment.
branchless 9y ago
Nope, it hasn't reached a natural ceiling. As the article says it's adding no real value above the background growth rate. The reason why it has overshot it's natural ceiling is because the price of college is set by available credit. The govt said they would lend X, that was the price. We should also learn this lesson for land. This is how prices are set.
- eveningcoffee 9y ago
  I think you both are right partially. In the meantime too many people learn to detest higher education and people with a degree.
pishpash 9y ago
You're thinking of college by looking at the average. College doesn't work like that. It never did. You'll always find a "Jim" that went to college and did fantastically well for it. Elitism works like the lottery, or the Netflix prize, or the Olympics. When the aggregate resource spent is averaged out per head, it's never worth it. But for the winners it is always worth it.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  The article averages all colleges, some major have significantly higher returns, choosing engineering for example you get both high returns but also a lower tuition cost and better outcome on average than, say, law schools where prestige and connections play a major factor in lifetime earning
  - randomdata 9y ago
    The key is to leveraging a degree is to major in a profession where labour supply is artificially constrained through the possession of that degree. There is good reason that 49% of the top 1% in the US have post-graduate degrees, while the high school or less group actually outnumber those with bachelor degrees only. It is not because of the education, but because the post-graduate degree bought them quota into a supply management system, so to speak. The trouble is that these outliers, who are able to realize artificially high incomes due to the artificial labour supply constraints, make it appear that everyone with a degree can do better than without when observed on average. But closer inspection of the data does not continue to back it up. Despite substantial increases in college attainment over the last several decades, incomes have remained stagnant.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dsacco 9y ago
I believe the cost-benefit analysis you speak of desperately needs to become part of public consciousness sooner rather than later. We can't rely on students to have the maturity and direction to maximize their college experience, but we also cannot rely on them to succeed without any educational structure for precisely the same reasons. There should be something in place, but it is often predatory under the current paradigm. In my opinion, college as a publicly subsidized institution of educational breadth needs to end. I think that we could move towards reducing the current burden by doing the following: 1. Privatize student loans entirely, and give them eligibility for bankruptcy. 2. Eliminate all degrees that do not demonstrate a true specialized skill in the manner of a vocation, or a level of academic rigor that cannot be achieved outside an academic setting. 3. End the cultural stigma against those without a college degree. 4. Regulate the use of college as a requirement in job listings, and disallow it as a filter unless it can be specifically demonstrated to be required for a specialized skill (through legislation, if necessary). 5. Reduce the number of courses in an undergraduate degree. Get rid of courses that are not "in the major", and supplement what's left with practical subjects that are critical for personal success (taxes, personal finance, etc). I don't think this is ever going to happen. But I do earnestly believe it would be the best possible outcome. It's also imperfect and a message board comment obviously cannot flesh out the implementation details. But it's a start! Privatizing student loans and allowing the debt to be relinquished through bankruptcy would provide a free market incentive for eliminating degrees that are generally unproductive. There are many courses of study aside from the stereotypical "basket weaving" which are taken because kids simply don't have the maturity or direction to understand what they want to do or accomplish with a degree. These harm more than they help, in my opinion, because they forget most of what they learn anyway. Ending the stigma against the choice to go without a degree could help drive people who would otherwise get poor degrees to go into practically useful vocations, at least until they decide they'd like to do something else. It might also lessen the stigma of adults who return to college later than "college age." Regulating the use of college as a professional filter would be tricky, because historically this seems to bounce it some other form of signaling (it used to be an IQ test, then it was college, etc). But it might tighten the loop between a choice in major and a choice in career, which is acceptable if it becomes culturally okay to make that decision closer to when the brain is fully developed and if the time required for the degree is shortened (e.g. you could simply go back, if you want). Finally, you'd help accomplish that last point by reducing the number of courses required for a full degree, potentially bringing the time to complete an undergraduate down to two years. In my opinion, the ideal of undergraduate education is somewhere between the current Master's degree and vocational training.
rebootthesystem 9y ago
> reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to No, this is real. One of my kid's friends is going for Mechanical Engineering at a school that will cost her $60K per year. And she is committed to go past and Bachelor's and obtain a Masters. I have begged and pleaded with her to reconsider. I have done all the research for her showing salary potential, payments and a comparison showing what would happen if the delta in payments were to be invested in a Roth IRA for, say 30 years. She won't budge. This girl is going to graduate with an M.E. degree and $300K in debt. This is insane beyond belief. That degree is not worth that kind of money, not by a long shot. Average salaries are in the $60K to $80K range depending on location and industry. Getting significantly north of $100K is very difficult and getting to $200K seems down-right impossible. And so this girl is going to have MD level debt with an earning potential nowhere near that of an MD. In other words, she is signing up for financial slavery. And worst than that, she is making a bad decision today that will cause severe damage to her future family. She will realize this when she marries and has kids. And, if her husband comes in with another $200K in debt. Well, that's a formula for a really shitty life for 30+ years. Great education, shit life. I have to admit I don't understand how these decisions are made. BTW, I forget the exact number but investing $500 a month on a Roth IRA from, say, 20 to 50 years of age has you waking up one day with something like $1.6 million in the bank. Keep at it until age 65 and it is somewhere around $3 million. Which means that paying an extra $500 a month for a high dollar student loan has a huge opportunity cost. A $300K loan probably means payments that are $1000 a month above those for a loan to go to a mid-tier university. And so she said: "My parents are going to take out a second mortgage and pay $200K out of the $300K. It'll be OK." To which I replied: You are smart, you took a lot of advanced math in High School. Go figure out how much you would have in 30 years if your parents gave you $200K and paid for you to go to an investment adviser to invest that money wisely. Then do the research and find out how much more you might earn if you pay $300K for your degree rather than $100K.
- ewjordan 9y ago
  The reality is pretty simple, though: a lot of people making decisions like this will look at their career options when they graduate and have to face the real world, struggle for a while, then realize that they're more than qualified to make twice the money as a junior programmer and make the switch then, recouping their costs easily unless they're really stubborn. Half the people that I went to school with in physics, math, econ, bio, did exactly that. They're doing just fine now because TBH, those fields are vastly more intellectually challenging to learn at a research level than being a well qualified working programmer is (doing proper CS at a grad level is a different story, on par with those other fields, but you don't need to be a research-class CS PhD to be an above average programmer), and most of them already had to learn to program to get through their courses anyways, so it's an easy transition. It's the people in completely non-technical majors that have the most trouble, because they don't know math, they don't understand proofs or algorithms, or even basic problem solving, let alone how to design systems, and worse, they've never really had to learn to effectively use software except in extremely limited ways.
rocho 9y ago
I don't think this comparison is sound. First of all, are you investing the same money in both cases? Even with a smaller annualized ROI you can earn more by investing more at the start. This brings us to the second point: if you skipped college to just invest in the market, where are you taking the money? I would be very surprised if you managed to obtain a loan of some tens of thousands of dollars by stating that you will invest then. And even if you did, the blog post calculations didn't account for the interest rate that would necessarily have to be included in this case. Let's say you invest your savings then. The majority of teens out of high school has little to no savings, and it's a fact that jobs you can apply to out of high school pay much less than those requiring a degree or more (at least in the first few years).
headmelted 9y ago
We've had free access to college courses via the web for quite some time now (Coursera, edX etc.), but they have not yet usurped the status quo in the way many (myself included) had hoped. I figure there's two factors behind this: 1) People want a "college lifestyle". It wouldn't really matter much to me, but I know this is something kids leaving home care about, so it's surely a massive factor. 2) People NEED to have a piece of paper with a fancy stamp. This to me is the biggest problem, and I don't know of an easy solution. To share my own anecdotal story: I was working on freelance projects prior to going to university (this is some time ago now). I won't say I didn't learn anything there, but certainly I went to many lessons covering material I was already familiar with, in much greater depth, from my own learning. As there was no way for me to get a job interview without the degree, I stayed put and ran up years of student debt. The first issue lies with the student. The second lies with the industry at large. Maybe this is how that happens - the dawning realization that higher education doesn't begin and end with college - and folks start to really look at the other options seriously.
- vkou 9y ago
  1) People want a "college lifestyle". It wouldn't really matter much to me, but I know this is something kids leaving home care about, so it's surely a massive factor. This is manufactured demand. Many other countries have a norm of commuter schools (Where most students live with their parents). Those that don't tend to have cheap, barracks-like housing, instead of 'lavish' dorms.
  - PatentTroll 9y ago
    Yeah, I'd support throwing some cold water on the demand for a 'college lifestyle' too. You know what, I would also like to be young and have all of my bills paid for (by loans) and live in a small town with only other young, similarly situated people. Sure, it's cool and all, but does it benefit society at all? It's a monumentally stupid cultural norm that should be dissuaded as much as possible. As should the norm that people should go to college right after high school. Maybe that's good for some people, but it's a silly cultural norm too. I guess the problem lies in the fact that uneducated 18 year olds are pretty much useless otherwise, but maybe we could grow the idea of apprenticeship for white collar jobs more to fill that gap. In many ways, undergraduate education is the new high school degree, and post-graduate is more like what a bachelors used to be like. And that follows the pattern I'm advocating above, people are older and have some work experience.
yourapostasy 9y ago
Some interesting questions arise from these observations. * Other comments in this thread rightly point out that US higher education loan policy is largely the cause of unsustainable growth of college tuition. However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students, like at Yale? Or allocate to competitively recruit and retain proven professors with observable education outcomes (or invest in establishing metrics to identify such outcomes)? Is there a herd effect at work in how colleges decide to spend the largesse, and if so, where did it roughly originate from? * I find it interesting that the standard investment is effectively an S&P 500 index fund. If your slow collective consciousness meme is on point, then pointing more working and middle class towards indexing with big life goals like children's higher education could have big ramifications for the financial industry, as one of the large institutions supporting the industry---pensions---starts eroding away in the future, and now another source of funding in 529 plans might open up more to indexing. How likely is indexing going to replace pensions, and when will most 529 plans shift to indexing? * It is common for US employers to note that colleges are producing graduates that do not hit the road running at the workplace. There are quantified lists of skills that are observed missing in the graduates [1] [2]. Why aren't there "finishing schools" set up to teach these skills? [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-skills-that-new-graduates-lack https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-sk... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these-are-the-skills-bosses-say-new-college-grads-do-not-have/#7b5a10f35491 https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these...
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  The Fast Company story is weird. It lists Scala and Go as "MOST SOUGHT AFTER" skills. First, IMO it's weird to consider particular languages as "skills" when talking at a sort of macro level about educational preparedness. "Go schools" and "Scala schools" won't fare much better than "Java schools", and we'll be having this same conversation but replacing Scala with Haskell and Go with Rust (etc. -- you get the idea). (And if you need to go to a finishing school to learn Scala or Go after college, the college has fundamentally failed at its primary task.) Second, Ctrl-F for Scala in the latest Who's Hiring thread -- some Javascript frameworks are more in demand. And I'd imagine Who's Hiring threads are more representative of the sort of companies hiring FP programmers than a generic jobs board. The Forbes article is more interesting -- communication, interpersonal skills, teamwork, data analysis (which, if we step outside the zeitgeist and generalize across several generations of in-demand technical skills, we should really just read as "mathematical maturity" and "ability to self-learn"). Those are all the sorts of things you don't simply teach in a single course. They require prolonged situational exposure, of the sort that colleges readily provide. The problem is that students don't avail themselves of challenging course work and extra-curricular activities, and universities don't demand it.
sametmax 9y ago
You already have a serious education problem in the US. But now, with more and more people that will avoid college, the country future seems quite bleak. Trump like events are going to accumulate. And with the US dept and war lord attitude, this is looking bad for the whole planet.

rubber_duck 9y ago

Going to college is not really a cost benefit calculation - there are plenty of degrees with low job market demand and a lot of them are popular. Part of the reason why there is such pressure on the prices, sort of like palliative care vs. spare no expense for the aging population drives up medical prices.

white-flame 9y ago
Just picking apart a few nits: Medical care is part of survival. Going to a university for job training is part of survival (and as an aside, I think it's an inappropriate use of academia in the long view). But going to a university for life betterment, intellectual pursuit, or even just ego is a luxury. So there's no real price pressure on the latter, only the former. I would say that just having the magic paper is what low market demand degree pursuers want, regardless of the major. But that means the paper itself has high market demand, even if the actual field of study doesn't, so it still comes down to cost-benefit calculations. The reason they chose that specific degree is to lower the exertion cost of the beneficial degree.

twotwotwo 9y ago

And college got expensive partly through policy choices. Offering easy loans tends to make people price insensitive, so tuitions go up and a lot of that money goes to things like increasingly fancy buildings and making textbook publishers' shareholders rich. Meanwhile often less is going to state schools that, with low in-state tuitions, were historically a way up for a lot of people. (An older friend went to Berkeley a few decades ago for under $1,000.) There's some comparison to the housing bubble, where policy also supported big loans. Don't have all the answers, but less emphasis on loans, competition from better-supported state and other non-profit schools, and having multiple forms of post-high-school education and credentialing available could all potentially help to bring some competition and sanity back to all this.

jaggi1 9y ago
This comment is likely to fetch downvotes because you are suggesting that government should not subsidize both.
MrTonyD 9y ago
I remember reading an article describing how college costs can be explained by an analysis of supply and demand. There have been a variety of historic reasons for demand rising at different times - mostly related to unemployment and lack of other economic choices. I keep hearing the meme that low-cost college is the cause of college expense - but college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > I keep hearing the meme that low-cost college is the cause of college expense I think you've misunderstood what you're hearing: low cost college by definition can't be the cause of high cost college. The claim is that high availability of funds/liquidity for college is what pushes up prices,since there are more dollars available to chase a supply that hasn't kept pace[1]. > college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing. This doesn't really make any sense. Colleges that are provided for free are a lot less dependent on markets to determine prices: they treat them like a more or less generic public good (where college choice is determined by quality of student more than ability to pay). [1] strictly speaking, the supply hasn't been that constrained, but since college is largely perceived as a positional good, this affects all but the bottom rung for-profit colleges.

mquander 9y ago

That doesn't seem necessarily right. College is an investment of limited size that you can more or less make once per lifetime, and the market for it is about the furthest thing from an efficient or free one you could ever think of, with subsidies and regulations and externalities coming from every angle. It's not obvious that it might not persist as an "unreasonably" good or bad investment.

branchless 9y ago

Nope, it hasn't reached a natural ceiling. As the article says it's adding no real value above the background growth rate. The reason why it has overshot it's natural ceiling is because the price of college is set by available credit. The govt said they would lend X, that was the price. We should also learn this lesson for land. This is how prices are set.

eveningcoffee 9y ago
I think you both are right partially. In the meantime too many people learn to detest higher education and people with a degree.

pishpash 9y ago

You're thinking of college by looking at the average. College doesn't work like that. It never did. You'll always find a "Jim" that went to college and did fantastically well for it. Elitism works like the lottery, or the Netflix prize, or the Olympics. When the aggregate resource spent is averaged out per head, it's never worth it. But for the winners it is always worth it.

LoSboccacc 9y ago
The article averages all colleges, some major have significantly higher returns, choosing engineering for example you get both high returns but also a lower tuition cost and better outcome on average than, say, law schools where prestige and connections play a major factor in lifetime earning
- randomdata 9y ago
  The key is to leveraging a degree is to major in a profession where labour supply is artificially constrained through the possession of that degree. There is good reason that 49% of the top 1% in the US have post-graduate degrees, while the high school or less group actually outnumber those with bachelor degrees only. It is not because of the education, but because the post-graduate degree bought them quota into a supply management system, so to speak. The trouble is that these outliers, who are able to realize artificially high incomes due to the artificial labour supply constraints, make it appear that everyone with a degree can do better than without when observed on average. But closer inspection of the data does not continue to back it up. Despite substantial increases in college attainment over the last several decades, incomes have remained stagnant.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dsacco 9y ago

I believe the cost-benefit analysis you speak of desperately needs to become part of public consciousness sooner rather than later. We can't rely on students to have the maturity and direction to maximize their college experience, but we also cannot rely on them to succeed without any educational structure for precisely the same reasons. There should be something in place, but it is often predatory under the current paradigm. In my opinion, college as a publicly subsidized institution of educational breadth needs to end. I think that we could move towards reducing the current burden by doing the following: 1. Privatize student loans entirely, and give them eligibility for bankruptcy. 2. Eliminate all degrees that do not demonstrate a true specialized skill in the manner of a vocation, or a level of academic rigor that cannot be achieved outside an academic setting. 3. End the cultural stigma against those without a college degree. 4. Regulate the use of college as a requirement in job listings, and disallow it as a filter unless it can be specifically demonstrated to be required for a specialized skill (through legislation, if necessary). 5. Reduce the number of courses in an undergraduate degree. Get rid of courses that are not "in the major", and supplement what's left with practical subjects that are critical for personal success (taxes, personal finance, etc). I don't think this is ever going to happen. But I do earnestly believe it would be the best possible outcome. It's also imperfect and a message board comment obviously cannot flesh out the implementation details. But it's a start! Privatizing student loans and allowing the debt to be relinquished through bankruptcy would provide a free market incentive for eliminating degrees that are generally unproductive. There are many courses of study aside from the stereotypical "basket weaving" which are taken because kids simply don't have the maturity or direction to understand what they want to do or accomplish with a degree. These harm more than they help, in my opinion, because they forget most of what they learn anyway. Ending the stigma against the choice to go without a degree could help drive people who would otherwise get poor degrees to go into practically useful vocations, at least until they decide they'd like to do something else. It might also lessen the stigma of adults who return to college later than "college age." Regulating the use of college as a professional filter would be tricky, because historically this seems to bounce it some other form of signaling (it used to be an IQ test, then it was college, etc). But it might tighten the loop between a choice in major and a choice in career, which is acceptable if it becomes culturally okay to make that decision closer to when the brain is fully developed and if the time required for the degree is shortened (e.g. you could simply go back, if you want). Finally, you'd help accomplish that last point by reducing the number of courses required for a full degree, potentially bringing the time to complete an undergraduate down to two years. In my opinion, the ideal of undergraduate education is somewhere between the current Master's degree and vocational training.

rebootthesystem 9y ago

> reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to No, this is real. One of my kid's friends is going for Mechanical Engineering at a school that will cost her $60K per year. And she is committed to go past and Bachelor's and obtain a Masters. I have begged and pleaded with her to reconsider. I have done all the research for her showing salary potential, payments and a comparison showing what would happen if the delta in payments were to be invested in a Roth IRA for, say 30 years. She won't budge. This girl is going to graduate with an M.E. degree and $300K in debt. This is insane beyond belief. That degree is not worth that kind of money, not by a long shot. Average salaries are in the $60K to $80K range depending on location and industry. Getting significantly north of $100K is very difficult and getting to $200K seems down-right impossible. And so this girl is going to have MD level debt with an earning potential nowhere near that of an MD. In other words, she is signing up for financial slavery. And worst than that, she is making a bad decision today that will cause severe damage to her future family. She will realize this when she marries and has kids. And, if her husband comes in with another $200K in debt. Well, that's a formula for a really shitty life for 30+ years. Great education, shit life. I have to admit I don't understand how these decisions are made. BTW, I forget the exact number but investing $500 a month on a Roth IRA from, say, 20 to 50 years of age has you waking up one day with something like $1.6 million in the bank. Keep at it until age 65 and it is somewhere around $3 million. Which means that paying an extra $500 a month for a high dollar student loan has a huge opportunity cost. A $300K loan probably means payments that are $1000 a month above those for a loan to go to a mid-tier university. And so she said: "My parents are going to take out a second mortgage and pay $200K out of the $300K. It'll be OK." To which I replied: You are smart, you took a lot of advanced math in High School. Go figure out how much you would have in 30 years if your parents gave you $200K and paid for you to go to an investment adviser to invest that money wisely. Then do the research and find out how much more you might earn if you pay $300K for your degree rather than $100K.

ewjordan 9y ago
The reality is pretty simple, though: a lot of people making decisions like this will look at their career options when they graduate and have to face the real world, struggle for a while, then realize that they're more than qualified to make twice the money as a junior programmer and make the switch then, recouping their costs easily unless they're really stubborn. Half the people that I went to school with in physics, math, econ, bio, did exactly that. They're doing just fine now because TBH, those fields are vastly more intellectually challenging to learn at a research level than being a well qualified working programmer is (doing proper CS at a grad level is a different story, on par with those other fields, but you don't need to be a research-class CS PhD to be an above average programmer), and most of them already had to learn to program to get through their courses anyways, so it's an easy transition. It's the people in completely non-technical majors that have the most trouble, because they don't know math, they don't understand proofs or algorithms, or even basic problem solving, let alone how to design systems, and worse, they've never really had to learn to effectively use software except in extremely limited ways.

rocho 9y ago

I don't think this comparison is sound. First of all, are you investing the same money in both cases? Even with a smaller annualized ROI you can earn more by investing more at the start. This brings us to the second point: if you skipped college to just invest in the market, where are you taking the money? I would be very surprised if you managed to obtain a loan of some tens of thousands of dollars by stating that you will invest then. And even if you did, the blog post calculations didn't account for the interest rate that would necessarily have to be included in this case. Let's say you invest your savings then. The majority of teens out of high school has little to no savings, and it's a fact that jobs you can apply to out of high school pay much less than those requiring a degree or more (at least in the first few years).

headmelted 9y ago

We've had free access to college courses via the web for quite some time now (Coursera, edX etc.), but they have not yet usurped the status quo in the way many (myself included) had hoped. I figure there's two factors behind this: 1) People want a "college lifestyle". It wouldn't really matter much to me, but I know this is something kids leaving home care about, so it's surely a massive factor. 2) People NEED to have a piece of paper with a fancy stamp. This to me is the biggest problem, and I don't know of an easy solution. To share my own anecdotal story: I was working on freelance projects prior to going to university (this is some time ago now). I won't say I didn't learn anything there, but certainly I went to many lessons covering material I was already familiar with, in much greater depth, from my own learning. As there was no way for me to get a job interview without the degree, I stayed put and ran up years of student debt. The first issue lies with the student. The second lies with the industry at large. Maybe this is how that happens - the dawning realization that higher education doesn't begin and end with college - and folks start to really look at the other options seriously.

vkou 9y ago
1) People want a "college lifestyle". It wouldn't really matter much to me, but I know this is something kids leaving home care about, so it's surely a massive factor. This is manufactured demand. Many other countries have a norm of commuter schools (Where most students live with their parents). Those that don't tend to have cheap, barracks-like housing, instead of 'lavish' dorms.
- PatentTroll 9y ago
  Yeah, I'd support throwing some cold water on the demand for a 'college lifestyle' too. You know what, I would also like to be young and have all of my bills paid for (by loans) and live in a small town with only other young, similarly situated people. Sure, it's cool and all, but does it benefit society at all? It's a monumentally stupid cultural norm that should be dissuaded as much as possible. As should the norm that people should go to college right after high school. Maybe that's good for some people, but it's a silly cultural norm too. I guess the problem lies in the fact that uneducated 18 year olds are pretty much useless otherwise, but maybe we could grow the idea of apprenticeship for white collar jobs more to fill that gap. In many ways, undergraduate education is the new high school degree, and post-graduate is more like what a bachelors used to be like. And that follows the pattern I'm advocating above, people are older and have some work experience.

yourapostasy 9y ago

Some interesting questions arise from these observations. * Other comments in this thread rightly point out that US higher education loan policy is largely the cause of unsustainable growth of college tuition. However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students, like at Yale? Or allocate to competitively recruit and retain proven professors with observable education outcomes (or invest in establishing metrics to identify such outcomes)? Is there a herd effect at work in how colleges decide to spend the largesse, and if so, where did it roughly originate from? * I find it interesting that the standard investment is effectively an S&P 500 index fund. If your slow collective consciousness meme is on point, then pointing more working and middle class towards indexing with big life goals like children's higher education could have big ramifications for the financial industry, as one of the large institutions supporting the industry---pensions---starts eroding away in the future, and now another source of funding in 529 plans might open up more to indexing. How likely is indexing going to replace pensions, and when will most 529 plans shift to indexing? * It is common for US employers to note that colleges are producing graduates that do not hit the road running at the workplace. There are quantified lists of skills that are observed missing in the graduates [1] [2]. Why aren't there "finishing schools" set up to teach these skills? [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-skills-that-new-graduates-lack https://www.fastcompany.com/3059940/these-are-the-biggest-sk... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these-are-the-skills-bosses-say-new-college-grads-do-not-have/#7b5a10f35491 https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/05/17/these...

throwawayjava 9y ago
The Fast Company story is weird. It lists Scala and Go as "MOST SOUGHT AFTER" skills. First, IMO it's weird to consider particular languages as "skills" when talking at a sort of macro level about educational preparedness. "Go schools" and "Scala schools" won't fare much better than "Java schools", and we'll be having this same conversation but replacing Scala with Haskell and Go with Rust (etc. -- you get the idea). (And if you need to go to a finishing school to learn Scala or Go after college, the college has fundamentally failed at its primary task.) Second, Ctrl-F for Scala in the latest Who's Hiring thread -- some Javascript frameworks are more in demand. And I'd imagine Who's Hiring threads are more representative of the sort of companies hiring FP programmers than a generic jobs board. The Forbes article is more interesting -- communication, interpersonal skills, teamwork, data analysis (which, if we step outside the zeitgeist and generalize across several generations of in-demand technical skills, we should really just read as "mathematical maturity" and "ability to self-learn"). Those are all the sorts of things you don't simply teach in a single course. They require prolonged situational exposure, of the sort that colleges readily provide. The problem is that students don't avail themselves of challenging course work and extra-curricular activities, and universities don't demand it.

sametmax 9y ago

You already have a serious education problem in the US. But now, with more and more people that will avoid college, the country future seems quite bleak. Trump like events are going to accumulate. And with the US dept and war lord attitude, this is looking bad for the whole planet.