62 ms·

More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

• Rd6n6 5y ago
  The news has also been about record numbers of people quitting, changing careers, and going to school. Something is being misreported
• lumost 5y ago
  I’m noticing a paradoxical trend across multiple goods where the food is somehow becoming too expensive to be used. - Housing - Education - Healthcare If costs are too high for students to afford, why doesn’t the price fall? If it’s scarce why isn’t more of it produced?
  • bigthymer 5y ago
    Each of those is high cost for different reasons.
    • lumost 5y ago
      Do they though? All of them are financed via debt at some point in the chain. Healthcare through insurance providers, education through student debt, and housing via mortgages. If our monetary system is broken, and debt is artificially cheap - then you would expect price of these goods to rise above what consumers can pay.
• wnevets 5y ago
  I'm sure this will cause Colleges to lower their admission price right... right?
• UltraViolence 5y ago
  People are weighing the worth of a college degree versus the cost of obtaining one (both time and money) and the scale is tipping towards going to work without one. This is probably because the tuition fees have become so inflated that most people cannot recuperate the costs during their working career. Whether this is good or bad is still an open question. I'd claim that we have too many college-degree professionals and that companies claim they need them, when they really don't.
• Bostonian 5y ago
  I've read that more Americans start college than in other developed countries but that the fraction of college graduates is similar. This suggests that there are too many unqualified students attending college in the U.S., and if the declining enrollments are coming primarily from that group, it's a good thing.
  • fortran77 5y ago
    And now there are movements to eliminate SATs or similar standardized tests, allowing more unqualified students to enter college. Enrollment might also be down because of COVID. For many, I think, college is more about getting away from home and living in a fun-filled alternate world for a few years with dorm rooms, frat parties, etc. With remote classes and restrictions, why bother? (I'm imagining here -- I commuted to a local 4-year college on a public bus while also working. Then got my Master's degree in the evening while working full-time, in the early 80s.)
    • jack_pp 5y ago
      Those student lones are worth a lot to the govt, lifetime additional tax.
    • rjzzleep 5y ago
      SATs are the dumbest thing I've encountered in testing. In the US scoring high in some SATs will even qualify you for Mensa(gifted stamp). There are a handful of companies that own a huge margin of the standardized testing market(Pearson being one of them). From selling new test learning books every year, to the massive global standardized testing training market. Maybe the movements to eliminate SATs have a different agenda, but generally the main reason you need those SATs is because the average education level in the US is so horrendous. Instead of fixing that problem there are a handful organizations acting as money printing machines and gatekeepers for higher education. It's frankly disgusting. If you ever had to take ANY kind of industrialized generalized test, whether it's ISC2, PMI, 6 Sigma, TLA+ or just SAT's or IELTS/TOEFL GRE or even just normal US university multiple choice as a non American you might find the whole ordeal infuriatingly insulting(unless you studied medicine, in which case it's similar across the globe) It's a lazy cop out for not giving teacher enough resources to actually teach.
• jack_pp 5y ago
  A big reason for going to college is socializing so.. makes no sense to go now.
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    Socialising, sport, arts, drama, many people meet their spouse at university, yeah lots of reasons that don't apply any more.
    • brtkdotse 5y ago
      You can do all of those without incurring crippling debt.
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        Obviously, but a university packages it up into one integrated community. You can't pay to create a community. Maybe that's worth it to you or maybe it isn't. I spent eight years in university in total and really enjoyed it.
  • LanceH 5y ago
    I have a son in college. The services that his school offers are greatly reduced, but the tuition continues to climb year on year. If his major/career had the choice of degree vs work, the latter would be a really good choice right now.
  • tootahe45 5y ago
    I believe the socializing/networking thing is over-sold unless you go to a top-tier uni where students may be from wealthy families and are therefore well socialized, or do something non-cs like business studies. Everyone i studied with were introverts (gamer-types). High school was way better for socializing. Oh and there were like 2 females total in all of my CS classes.
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Everyone i studied with were introverts (gamer-types). Trick is to find ways out of the engineering department. I did Latin as an optional, and I was in a sports team where nobody was an engineer. Plus presumably you aren't living in an engineering-specific halls?
• goalieca 5y ago
  I feel sad for those doing a fully remote learning experience.
• sAbakumoff 5y ago
  why bother? you enroll to a college, you collect a huge debt that the government is not going to cancel - they prefer to give money to corporations instead. covid-19 disrupted in-person education and it's not gonna away any time soon. at the same time there are plenty of crypto startups that don't give a sh*t about education and could be pretty lukrative
  • reaperducer 5y ago
    I always chuckle when someone on HN inevitably rails against education in a post with bad spelling, grammar, and expletives.
    • qlm 5y ago
      You think expletives are a sign of poor education? How dull.
      • notreallyserio 5y ago
        Yeah, when combined with the bad spelling and grammar.
        • sAbakumoff 5y ago
          Dude I am not a native English speaker and I don't give a flying fck about spelling and grammar and people complaining about it.
          • reaperducer 5y ago
            You must care, or you would have typed the full expletive.
    • CountDrewku 5y ago
      Expletives are a sign of creative intelligence. Bad spelling/grammar are mostly just due to modern technology where people communicate differently. Those things aren't as important as they once were. You'll see "highly educated" individuals making the same mistakes. Lastly, there's the possibility you're speaking with someone who is not a native English speaker. Obviously, with your high IQ you should have been able to consider that scenario though ;)
• pacbard 5y ago
  This is probably related to teenagers enrolling in college not only for an education but also for the amenities that come with college life (think of greek life, moving away from parents, college sports, freedom to explore your identity, etc.) The pandemic has put a stop on most of all non-academic stuff, making enrolling in college less appealing to this group of students. It will be interesting to see a follow-up analysis that parses out enrollment behavior by subgroup (e.g., by SAT/ACT score) as it will be easier to understand who is choosing not to enroll in college. Another follow-up could be to see which institutions are losing students. It is known that college enrollment is counter-cyclical to the economy and that enrollment declines at community colleges and open access universities when people can get a job right out of high school.
  • stinkytaco 5y ago
    Most of the amenities you speak of are not available at community colleges, which have seen the biggest decline. The pandemic definitely figures into this, but I don't think amenities can account for the large decline in certificate and vocational training this represents.
    • jdavis703 5y ago
      Community college has also gotten really expensive. I was looking at the price for my alma matter, tuition has more than doubled since I graduated in 2010. The price has gone up faster than my university’s tuition, making the community college less competitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if economics also is contributing to declining community college enrollment.
    • coolso 5y ago
      Community College still absolutely offers a social experience even if it’s just being in the same classroom as other people. And Zoom interactions are still terribly inferior to real life in-person ones regardless of what kind of college you go to.
• mfer 5y ago
  US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population. This isn't likely to hit community colleges, which the article touches on. Just trying to point out that digging deeper might show some interesting details.
  • tuankiet65 5y ago
    From what I've seen , international students who are supposed to attend colleges in 2020 were affected the most: * Some abandoned their international studies plan and attended local colleges instead. * Some took a gap year to wait until 2021. * A minority pushed on and took classes online until they're able to come to the US.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    Certainly has to be a factor, but not many of them were headed to community college, which has seen the biggest drop.
  • rkk3 5y ago
    > US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population. The elephant in the room is that those foreign students are also the ones paying sticker price and subsidizing college for the other students, even at public schools.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• tootahe45 5y ago
  "It's very frightening," No, it isn't. A tight labor market which provides more opportunities for on-the-job training is positive for everybody except those who made their money selling fake tickets.
• baby-yoda 5y ago
  colleges have been expanding with zero constraints for 20+ years - demand for degrees increased significantly, enrollment went up and up, student loans being federally backed were given out to anyone for any amount so tuition naturally increased substantially. seemingly limitless growth opportunity? now many are massively bloated organizations with declining utility and the need to maintain their perpetual growth - who wants to cut costs? the downward spiral is only going to accelerate, IMO. and that doesn't even account for declining birth rates. my feeling is the next 20 years will see the higher ed industry contract rather quickly and the universities that remain will deliver either on quality (increasingly difficult to hold an advantage) or accessibility (inexpensive, contemporary workforce training since employers no longer do that).
  • pm90 5y ago
    The population of the US has increased all this time too, and so has foreign student enrollment.
    • rossdavidh 5y ago
      Not the college-age population, however.
  • syki 5y ago
    Enrollment in higher ed decreased 7% from 2008 to 2018. It’s not true that colleges have been expanding with zero constraints. The increase in tuition at public colleges and universities has occurred with the decrease in public funding per student. At my system 20 years ago roughly 60% of the cost of education was publicly funded and now it is 40%. We’ve correspondingly increased tuition. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/ch_3.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/ch_3.asp
    • baby-yoda 5y ago
      thank you for linking stats. going back to 1998 there is clearly huge growth. total enrollment might already be taking a hit but i am referring more to the expenditure side of things - dorm buildings, campus luxuries, etc. the figures from your link display this, IMO. especially the expenditures. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/figures/fig_12.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/figures/fig_12.asp but to be fair, yes the stats do indicate a decrease in enrollment. however degrees conferred has increased despite a decline in enrollment, any guesses as to that?
• fasteddie31003 5y ago
  Might be a good think. You're not going to be overburdened by debt. You don't have to spend some of your time learning worthless topics. You might not meet as many women, which let's face it is a big reason to go to college. At least in programming you can train yourself to make well over 6 figures without any formal education. You might need a mentor. If there are any high school grads not going to college who are looking for a tech mentor, reach out.
• disambiguation 5y ago
  Less than 3k kids under the age of 24 have died from covid since the start of the pandemic [0] yet they have some how wound up with the harshest restrictions. These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace. [0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
  • johnebgd 5y ago
    The problem with highly infectious diseases is those who get it also infect others. The professors are likely in the age bracket that has a higher risk than the student.
    • ars 5y ago
      The Professor is guaranteed to get it. A Professor comes in contact with way too many people to even have a chance of not getting it. You're just pretending that you can actually do something by making restrictions, you actually can't.
      • bryanlarsen 5y ago
        China has been very successful at preventing the original variants from spreading. So they provide an existence proof that it is possible, at least pre-Omicron. I'd rather live with ineffective American lockdowns than effective Chinese ones, but the Chinese example falsifies your statement.
        • tomschlick 5y ago
          Yeah I wouldn't believe anything related to the virus coming from China, especially numbers that make the CCP look good. They have too much of an incentive to lie, even more so that its finally not taboo to believe that the Wuhan lab was responsible for the outbreak.
          • The_rationalist 5y ago
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  I have 3 college-aged kids and one nearly there. Their universal concern is the cost. It has become prohibitive. Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy. If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.
  • lvl100 5y ago
    I am convinced college is more or less priced off of prestigious private high schools where the parents simply pay cash. For the wealthy it is acceptable to pay 60-70K per year for their kids. Clearly this represents the wealth gap in this country.
  • sylens 5y ago
    Yes, it's quite clearly this. Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
    • bart_spoon 5y ago
      Plus the amount and quality of alternative learning resources is very high, at least in some fields. I know coding bootcamps get a bad rep, often justified, but at the same time my buddy went to college for a degree in HR and I went for STEM. He ended up hating HR, did a 9 week boot camp, managed to get a job, and after a few years of experience is in roughly the same place as me and is thriving. It took him a little longer because of the time spent in HR, but ultimately he ended up with the same skill set I did between the 9 weeks of intensive study combined with on the job experience. Meanwhile I got a broader education, but the majority of it isn't very relevant on a day to day basis, if ever. It's a single anecdote, but between online resources and alternative training programs, it seems harder to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on college.
• strict9 5y ago
  This is a good thing. Too many people are entering college and taking on enormous debt to get something which is less of an edge for getting a job. Worse, many get saddled with debt and don't finish for various reasons. Meanwhile tuition and books keep skyrocketing as schools divert more of their attention away from academics and toward more profitable uses of institutional time and capital. But in a bit of good news, more jobs are ditching the degree requirement as workers as more scarce. I am glad the pandemic has opened the eyes of employers to realize that a degree is not the indicator it once was. Opinion: the self-taught are just as capable in the workforce and college degree requirements are gatekeeping.
  • chickenpotpie 5y ago
    Strongly disagree, a less educated society is nothing to celebrate. This isn’t a problem being solved, it’s a country giving up.
  • 9dev 5y ago
    Sure they are gatekeeping, but that's the problem. The gatekeeping will continue, artificially limiting access to highly paid jobs to the upper class.
• lanecwagner 5y ago
  College simply isn't the most effective way to be learning these days. Especially for undergraduate degrees, places like Kahn Academy, Qvault.io (mine) and FreeCodeCamp are working really well
• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  Start by lowering tuition fees. University administrations have become bloated, profiteering from the truism that you gotta go to college to get a good job. I got my B.A. in 1968; I owed $800 balance on my student loan ($6,400 today). My plumber just charged me $430 to install a sink, about an hour and a half's work. That doesn't include the cost of the sink. Are Gender Studies majors making this kind of money?
  • pingeroo 5y ago
    I realized the absurdity of this when I found out that my university's president earns more than the president of the United States
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    Government dollars went a lot further when a smaller percentage of people were enrolling in college. And there was unmet demand for college educated professionals (which is true in some fields today, but probably not as broadly true), so there was more willingness to spend government dollars educating people.
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  As the father of a 16-year old, I can say that the current generation of teenagers has heard a lot more about the issues of college debt than previous generations did. Partly because it's a lot higher, partly because even if newsmedia doesn't report on it, there are enough adults out there saddled with it that they just hear about it from a relative or friend. It used to be a no-brainer; you go to college if you can. No longer. Any industry that sees nothing but expansion for decades, has a rough time when it stops. I think higher ed is in for a rough time.
  • taylodl 5y ago
    No. Things are just going back to the way they used to be: higher education is for the elites. Once upon a time we understood that higher education was important for all and having a well-educated public was good for the Republic. Now that view no longer holds - the politicians have learned that their flim-flam doesn't work as well on a well-educated public and so they've been making cuts to higher education for the past 20 years. We're just now getting to the point where the cuts are having a serious impact to the middle class being able to afford college. Don't worry though - the elites will be just fine.
    • 9dev 5y ago
      Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". It's enough to assume elites were greedy (and/or dense) and didn't consider long-term effects, you don't even need a decades-spanning conspiracy for it. The elites won't be as fine once they realise much of their wealth stems from the rest of the republic, but that seems to be the circle humanity is caught in for eternity.
      • mistrial9 5y ago
        it is my vague impression from history that in real yet slow-moving crisis, those that are able to command and control high-value resources do in fact continue to thrive while others fail in increasing numbers. This works, until it doesn't, to make a cute phrase, because in dynamic systems, either the system re-stabilizes in a new and different composition, or there is sudden, increased failure.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  Maybe it just got too damn expensive. I make pretty good money and I'm still planning carefully for how I'm going to deal with it for my kids (who still have 7-9 years left before college). I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus. Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids to stay home the first couple years and hit the local community college for the first half of their degree, just because it's dramatically cheaper than what it'll cost to send them to live at a university. I thought college was expensive when I was going in the 90s. Now it's just ridiculous.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    Aren't state colleges relatively affordable (while mostly OK academically)?
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      Relatively, yes, I believe so. But Oregon State still tells me to budget 30K/year for a resident undergrad. About half of that is living expenses, half is school.
      • Der_Einzige 5y ago
        WTF. My wife did the online OSU program and all we pay is in-state tuition (even if out of state!). She's an international student too! You will not be paying 30K a year for OSU e-campus. More like 10-15K a year or so.
        • bart_spoon 5y ago
          Well they said they were told to budget 30K a year, half for school expenses, and half for living expenses, so it sounds like their experience isn't contradictory with yours.
          • 5y ago
• lordnacho 5y ago
  We have to do something about what people think college is to an employer. I'm excluding courses where you specifically need the degree: medicine, law, and maybe some others. Clearly you can't be a doctor or lawyer who hasn't passed his exams. Also if you are going to be a professor or phd naturally you will need to have studied whatever it is. For everyone else, all college does is shows people that you are diligent: you read the books, wrote the essays, passed the quizzes. Now, the thing is most jobs are not directly related to any particular degree. For example if you become an option trader like I did, nothing on my Engineering/Econ/Mgt was relevant. Even the finance parts of the management course were not relevant. You learn on the job. Think about it, you are at work 50-70 hours a week the whole year vs splitting your time at uni over a much shorter calendar. At work you sit next to an expert, at school you sit next to novices. So the whole idea that college qualifies you to do something is bogus. It's mainly a signal that you're teachable, and a weak signal that you're interested in some particular broad area. I would guess that the great majority of jobs that people with degrees take could have been done by the same people without their degree. You'll never get people to admit that if you aren't friends with them, but that is generally what people think as well. Are there other benefits to college? Certainly. You get to socialize, mature a bit away from home, and for most people it's the last time they are exposed to the great ideas that mankind has found over the centuries. Those things can all be done separately without paying for it, but currently the system is broken and everyone uses degrees as a social status marker, which is self-reinforcing: you still need a degree because if you don't have one you can't get those jobs that you don't need a degree to perform.
  • ls15 5y ago
    > Are there other benefits to college? I think I learned a thing or two at university.
  • nslice 5y ago
    A degree is just a filter. If you get 200 applications for a job listing, you are going to prioritize those with relevant degrees.
    • lordnacho 5y ago
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I hope this catches on: https://www.wsj.com/articles/instead-of-tuition-students-give-schools-cut-of-future-salaries-11577804401 https://www.wsj.com/articles/instead-of-tuition-students-giv... If we can align the incentives of colleges and students to find jobs, it will also be a win for the economy. Let students bargain with their future earning potential, if they don’t make anything, the school doesn’t make anything.
  • Afforess 5y ago
    Here's my counter: what if, instead of taxing students after their graduation, we taxed all adults income, then used the tax proceeds to make university tuition cost-free. The advantage would be that more students would attend, we'd have a more educated society, and alumni would not be worried about having to take the best paying job instead of one that they desire. It's win-win-win, taxpayers get free access to universities for themselves and their children, students avoid debt or garnished wages in the future, and universities get government support and can shut down complicated administrative overhead for helping students navigate financing. Now I know your thinking - does it scale? Yes! We have data from secondary and primary schools with the same cohort of students, who attend school for no cost. Attendance and graduation of these schools is closely correlated with life outcomes and success! We could apply this existing financing model to universities and solve the problem of tuition fees with by reusing the ideas from other tuition-free primary and secondary schools. Prob a bit long for an elevator pitch, but hey.
    • leetcrew 5y ago
      the linked article describes a percentage-based income sharing scheme. the student isn't necessarily incentivized to get a higher paying job than they would otherwise. the school definitely is incentivized to guide students into more lucrative jobs, but that's probably a good thing for the median student. as for the free college idea, this seems like a solution for the wrong problem. I'd argue a large chunk of students are already wasting their time getting a credential that shouldn't be necessary for the work they plan to do. I'm not convinced it's automatically good for more people to graduate college. four years is a long time to spend doing something without a clear, concrete reason to do so.
• twox2 5y ago
  The cost is simply not worth the value, but some state/community schools are more affordable.
• xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there. Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals. I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?
  • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > after all we want humanity to be advancing, right? I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
    • long_time_gone 5y ago
      Communicating with eachother, knowledge of business, and understanding language seem like things we would want more of in society. Not sure why they would be demonized. Is the goal of higher-education to promote learning and build a well-rounded citizenry or to create worker drones?
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Not sure why they would be demonized Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not. There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  Cost and COVID hitting guaranteed in person learning is what I imagine. I remember thinking online learning was as waste in the mid-2000s. Has it improved?
• racl101 5y ago
  - It got very expensive - Depending on what you choose it might not even be rewarding - You'll be saddled with crippling debt forever Nah. You're better off paying a couple of thousand for a coding bootcamp and have a better chance of finding some work and actually pay off the smaller debt you might have incurred.
• dpierce9 5y ago
  There are a lot of people blaming federal loans for the inflation in college costs, however, private secondary school (high school) tuition has also grown at a comparable rate (maybe even faster). There are not, to my knowledge, federal loans for private secondary schools. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Edit: clarified that private secondary school = private high school. Of course federal student loans are available for accredited private colleges/universities. Not sure the reliability of this source but the trend is there across sources: [0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school
  • jackson1442 5y ago
    There do appear to be federal loans for private schools- Baylor is a private school in Texas, here’s their site on loans: https://www.baylor.edu/sfs/index.php?id=963417 https://www.baylor.edu/sfs/index.php?id=963417
    • dpierce9 5y ago
      Baylor is not a secondary school. Secondary school = high school.
  • zactato 5y ago
    When I was in school the loans were called stafford loans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Loan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Loan I guess they've since changed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Direct_Student_Loan_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Direct_Student_Loan_Pr... They are very much for private schools. There's no real limit on them. They tend to cover the difference between what a family can pay and what the tuition is. They're generally low interest and you don't need to start paying them back until you're done with school. Since the loans always cover the difference the impact of tuition costs going up isn't immediately felt
    • dpierce9 5y ago
      These are for college, not high school. Private high school costs have gone up as fast or faster than college. This cannot be explained by the availability of federal loans.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  Theirs a few factors. First birth rates are generally down. Not only in America,but worldwide. >Wages at the bottom of the economy have increased dramatically, making minimum-wage jobs especially appealing to young people as an alternative to college. This isn't an ether or situation. I worked full time while going to school full time. In fact this was my entire senior year of college. I actually got to 6 figures without a degree, but the entire point of college for me was getting away from my horrible family. It's still a good way to get distance. This is great news overall. Tuition will have to drop and schools will offer more flexibility to working students. In my home state of California the UCs are hostile to anyone with a 9-5, I hope this changes.
• gr1zzlybe4r 5y ago
  The only reason you should go to college if you're not getting a pre-professional degree is to network. I made the mistake of thinking that the purpose was to get what is essentially a certificate stating that you went to a good school and got good grades. I do think it was a net positive overall, but in reality I think I would've done just the same by going to school and networking, partying my ass off for 4 years, and then figuring it out after. If you can do those things without going to college then it's a no brainer _not_ to go.
• mmmmkay 5y ago
  because it's a joke lol
• noasaservice 5y ago
  1. School loans are not dismissable in bankruptcy. This is only shared with criminal monetary punishments. 2. Interest is charged, which is abhorrent at any rate. Especially the 8%. 3. PPP "loans" to the tune of almost 1t$.. which were forgiven. Just run a few sham job ads for software engineers at 10$/hr and NobOdy wAnTS tO wOrk! 4. University doesn't really provide job skills. They allude to, but then say they dont. 5. Jobs say they need a degree, but that's primarily due to https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/griggs-v-duke-power-co/ https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/griggs-v-duke-power-co/ and easier to exclude black people with a 'degree'. 6. Most programs do NOT need expensive schools, labs, etc. Non-lab based classes can easily get by online. 7. School costs are stupid, because "Its what the market will bear" 8. Even public higher ed schools are stupid priced, because the public aspect has been surely ripped away from them. 9. Even if you DO go, you're guaranteed only one thing: undismissable debt. I failed out due to medical reasons. I have the debt, and no degree to show for it. As a millenial, higher ed is a bad bargain. And if you're younger, DO NOT LET HIGH SCHOOL threaten you with "if you dont go to school you will work as a grocery bagger for the rest of your life". Teach yourself IT. Get into an area, double down, learn it inside and out. Find a few hot tech areas. Learn them well. And off you go.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    I love how the solution is always to do tech. What about the other things?
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      Well, the other things are likely not worth it. You can tell because they try to hide outcomes from prospective students. The things that will yield good outcome for an individual all lead with the outcome. The things that don't always lead with some sort of identity-nonsense: "You will be a well-rounded individual" but don't actually show the median example of this well-rounded individual post-degree.
      • endisneigh 5y ago
        Really? Tech is the only career that’s likely worth it?
• ravenstine 5y ago
  Most of the college graduates I know ended up not using their degree because they majored in something no one cares about like communications, philosophy, journalism, etc. Maybe some people are figuring out that flipping burgers or literally just hanging out at home is a better use of their time from a financial standpoint than spending 4 or more years taking various prerequisites to get a degree that only results in more debt. Bell curves gonna bell curve, so it's not like all of these people are gonna have what it takes to instead become doctors, lawyers, and politicians. As far as I'm concerned, besides the fields that deal with the fate of a person's life (like doctors and lawyers), the whole idea of going to college and getting a masters in whatever your heart's desire deserves to be imploded. I see no sense in those saying that we need to "fix universities". Honestly, fuck universities for acting they're worth as much as they are while still pretending their priority is the students. Everything I learned in college and the different schools I went to can now be learned online or at the library for free or for $29.99. In a few generations, universities will be naturally replaced with more practical alternatives. So why try to prop up these archaic institutions for the sake of the average person rather than the exceptional? Such a desire is more of a fetish for an image of what universities represent.
  • reilly3000 5y ago
    >something no one cares about like communications, philosophy, journalism, etc. Excuse me? No one cares about fields that employ 2.8 million workers [BLS.gov 2020] ? No one cares about work that provides information, entertainment, and shapes political views? FYI your doctors, lawyers, and politician's biggest expense line items usually include money going to communications and media professionals. I and many others resonate with the notion of 'useless degrees', but you chose some terrible examples. That said, there is more value to education than vocation, and your inability to see that shows that you missed quite a bit in yours. The classical liberal arts education could and should be continually reimagined for a changing world, but to wholly discount its importance is capitalist orthodoxy that misses much of what life is about. Read a goddamn book.
    • ravenstine 5y ago
      > Read a goddamn book. > [...] to wholly discount its importance is capitalist orthodoxy Touched a nerve, eh? You have no clue what books I've read or how many. I didn't "wholly discount" the importance of so-named classical liberal arts. But there aren't many good reasons for putting one's self into debt to get a degree in such things. Be honest, liberal arts isn't heart surgery. Liberal arts can be learned for free if it is the knowledge itself that is of highest importance. The cost of majoring in these areas of studies are hardly congruent with how well they prepare someone to become a part of the world outside of academia and the cost that they bear. Perhaps to certain individuals the cost still is justified by the end result they are aiming towards, but to assume that everyone going into the liberal arts is in college not because society is cajoling them into it would be highly ignorant. You're mistaking my valuation of the degree for a valuation of the subject mater itself. Are you familiar with the growing amount of student debt in the United States? Liberal arts are no exception, and there's nothing I'm aware of about fields it encompasses that justifies the expense in both time and debt. It appears to be a racket.
• awb 5y ago
  I’ve been recruiting for US startups since 2008, probably recruited over 100 folks from engineers to C-level. I have never considered a candidate’s college or if they even attended one. The only thing I evaluated is what they accomplished in the last 1-2 years. That meant hiring some brilliant engineers straight out of high school. Most of these candidates were early stage hires for dozens of companies that went on to become billion dollar public companies or get acquired for 8-10 figures. As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission. Almost your entire career value is dependent on how well you can self-learn and self-motivate. The one important piece that school might teach or give you exposure to is how to collaborate effectively with others.
  • ryanmarsh 5y ago
    > As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission. This right here. The strongest argument against the status quo is that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. In aggregate college graduates could achieve equal or greater levels of learning, relative to their chosen profession, and cost, with education regimes other than the typical four year state college experience.
  • netsec_burn 5y ago
    I can attest to universities not being useful for helping you get in to a career, besides resume writing. I attended one career fair sponsored by a university I attended. There were about 60 different booths, and two of them were tech companies. The first offered 40k/yr. They had already reached out to me prior to the career fair and I declined to move cities for a 40k/yr position, there were plenty of state jobs paying that. The second was Amazon. I asked if they had any SWE roles. They said there were only warehouse jobs.
  • strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    My ideal college would be 2 years of straight up technical computer science/math, followed by straight going into the industry. If you want to learn theory in depth, that is what grad school should be for.
• lwhi 5y ago
  Feels sensible to not go to college in a pandemic though?
• ryanmarsh 5y ago
  My oldest daughter is in pre-nursing and is applying to nursing school at her university for next year. I know of no other way to get into nursing but though a typical university. Thankfully the state of Texas is paying for her education due to the Hazelwood Act. My middle daughter wants to study art (she is an artist and sees a future in it for herself). My benefits will expire by the time she applies to college. So she’s not likely to end up at a four year university. I have a hunch my youngest daughter may want to study computer science. Unless the cost of school changes I may put together a program for her myself mixed with online schools and traditional CS resources.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• wintermutestwin 5y ago
  My kids are going to college in an EU country where their BA degrees take three years, but each class is related to their major. In the US, our inane curriculum wastes two years retaking general ed classes that they should have learned in HS. Borrowing to pay tuition to take general ED classes is dumb, and yet, this is the path that is pushed on our best and brightest. At the least, kids should gen ed in Community College. At the best, we should reform or horrible curriculum.
• panzagl 5y ago
  The dean of students at my daughter's university (Montana State) has been pretty upfront about this mostly being demographics- Gen Z is smaller than the Millennials. That being said, both of my daughter's had drilled into their heads how expensive college would be by their HS teachers and staff. We're continually telling them not to worry about it, it's our responsibility to pay, not theirs, don't feel bad for not going into STEM, etc. Doesn't help that we live out west where anti-intellectualism is the default and a degree is just seen as a piece of paper.
  • starwind 5y ago
    I live in Colorado. I don't see a lot that I would "anti-intellectualism" since I live close to Denver but I definitely see a much higher value placed on skills than degrees
    • panzagl 5y ago
      Well, it won't surprise you that I live a little south of you. But even in Denver try telling people that your daughter is double majoring in history and classics- the looks I get mostly range from "she's crazy" to "you're an idiot for letting her do that". Nevermind that her 'hyper expensive education' will cost less than their dually F-250...
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Good. It’s a scam. It is a horrifically inefficient knowledge delivery system enabled by predatory loans, with tremendous societal pressure to participate, and a tribal mentality that causes former participants to pressure their kids and friends into making the same mistake they did.
• blululu 5y ago
  It’s easy to say that the crippling cost of higher education is behind this drop. And while college admins are slowly turning the screw on American students, this is more of a gradual process. The immediate drop here is from foreign students deciding to stay closer to home as a result of the pandemic, visa restrictions and a drop in value of actually getting to experience the culture: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/declining-international-student-numbers-stabilize https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/decl...
• w-m 5y ago
  For some perspective, in Germany we've seen rising number of university students since 2007: 1.94M students in 2007, 2.94M in 2020. From 2020 to 2021, numbers have stagnated (+0.1%). There's few private colleges (mostly international business schools I guess?), a large majority of students goes to the public universities. The eduction is free, but you pay a few hundred Euros per semester in administrative charges, which usually includes a ticket for city or state public transport. You can get a loan from the state (BAföG) to cover living expenses, which you will pay back after finishing, when you have a job (well of course things are more complicated, but that's the gist). The maximum amount you have to pay back is 10.000 Euros, even if the size of the loan was larger.
• parkingrift 5y ago
  Most of the comments here are attributing this to costs, but that isn't clearly true (at all) from the article. This seems to be the result of a long term downward trend in enrollment which has rapidly accelerated during the pandemic. The fact that it has accelerated so rapidly during the pandemic is not likely due to costs, but due to other factors. The article itself posits that it is tangentially related to costs as kids are choosing to work rather than pay for school. However, that association feels pretty shaky and doesn't hold up to scrutiny as to why these changes accelerated so rapidly during the pandemic. I don't have a data-driven answer, either. However, my guess would be that students are uninterested in an online college experience and don't see the value in spending to attend a lucrative school so that they can then sit at home on their laptop. If I had to bet I would guess that enrollment ticks back once all these restrictions are abandoned.
  • Brybry 5y ago
    The article doesn't mention population changes either. A significant part of the recent downward trend could be because there are fewer college age people in the population. Just eyeballing it looks like fewer 18 year olds every year for the last 15 to 30 years? [1] A more interesting statistic might be students per capita within the college age bracket. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#/media/File:USA2020dec1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
• indymike 5y ago
  There are three problems that colleges need to fix. 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. 2) There are better options than college for many. One of my daughters did a six month digital marketing bootcamp. She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr. 3) College is way over priced. They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree. 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free.
  • srcreigh 5y ago
    Your point #3 just looks at two different things. They don't contradict each other at all. Maybe had a job before age 18 implies later went to college for instance.
  • rgrieselhuber 5y ago
    One question I’ve had is if tuition paid via student loans can go to a college endowment. That should end immediately, if so.
    • brewdad 5y ago
      Tuition money is fungible. If a school gets 20% of it's funding from loans (no idea what the real number might look like) and uses 30% of tuition money to fund their endowment, then the accounting will show that all of the loan money went to fund operations and only cash payments went to the endowment. We've already seen this in every state where lottery funds "go to education." The new money doesn't increase the budget for education, it only frees up some money to be spent on something else.
      • 5y ago
• jimmyjazz14 5y ago
  I feel that for many people a good trade school would offer the best future and as we are seeing shortages in some important trade work it would be useful for society as well.
• Damogran6 5y ago
  I have two boys in post-secondary education (it would be SO much easier to say 'college', but one is in a community college and the other is in a Technical school) During a parent/student College night, the perky 20-something group of presenters did a GREAT job of showing the schools, the perks, the ways to knock a little off the top (every student gets a scholarship! every student gets in-state tuition!) They didn't count on me being good at math, and my reluctance to add nearly $600k in family debt over 4 years...that's double my mortgage, and I have 30 years to pay that off. I decided as the patriarch that our family didn't need to prop up a broken system. I'm hopeful that I'm not scuttling my children's chances by doing so. So I'm footing half the bill, and the boys are acquiring $20k or so a piece in student loans. I'm hoping that's enough for them to get their first job, because in my experience, that's the last time the sheepskin had any impact on my career.
• randomsilence 5y ago
  Why does the market not work for colleges? There are plenty of adjunct professors who don't earn much. Why don't they join forces and create their own university? If they focus on education and limit spending on administration and sports, they could offer high quality, affordable education.
  • lapsedacademic 5y ago
    Three things: 1. There actually aren't many low-paid adjuncts in hot fields. The CS and Eng departments subsidize the Math department, and STEM+finance+premed+nursing subsidizes all of the humanities. A philosophy adjunct is probably doing way better ad juncting than they would off on their own. And the instructional staff in the in-demand fields are generally well-paid. 2. The low paid (and usually not that low paid) adjuncts within in-demand departments are generally there as a retirement gig... if they wanted a stressful empire building type of job, they'd go into industry. 3. Runway. Adjuncts who aren't semi-retired have no access to capital and here's a really long lead time until an institution is regionally accredited. You can't take a dime of federal grant money, GI bill money, private scholarship money, student loan money, etc. until you're accredited.
• nostromo 5y ago
  Most comments here are completely missing why this is happening now. Students don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for remote learning. They could watch Khan Academy videos instead for free, and they’d be better quality.
  • starwind 5y ago
    Bingo. If I graduated in the last two years, I would have gone to work at a grocery store while taking a couple core classes online while I waited for colleges to get back to normal
  • saghm 5y ago
    I was surprised how low this theory was in both the article and in this comment section! The article even opens with talking about the trend continuing fall 2020 (the first school year that began since the shutdowns hit the US), and yet it takes almost halfway down the article to mention "remote learning" and then another big chunk before the word "pandemic" is used (I didn't see "virus" or "COVID" either before then). I'm not saying all the other issues discussed in the article and elsewhere in this comment section aren't there, but given the timeline I feel like any convincing theory has to first address why that isn't the dominant factor.
  • pingeroo 5y ago
    Funnily enough me and my peers usually end up watching Khan Academy videos anyway since they do a way better job of explaining topics than university content.
    • throwabone33 5y ago
      Mayhaps by design. Who would you rather hire to run through an obstacle course? One who has a certificate of having run a course of hoops for 4 years, or one that looks fit enough to run it? Arguably both may work. Can you measure which one is more likely to cost you your job? Depending on your obstacle course you may be looking for more specific qualifiers.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
• honkycat 5y ago
  Neoliberalism at its finest. Trim the fat until you cut into the bone. And we wonder why we have a staffing crisis in our medical field! This is BAD. NEWS. for us Americans. How are we supposed to compete on an international scale if we are not training the next generation of knowledge workers[0]? Part of the thing I always hated about Uni is that it felt very... kamikaze. You have one shot. I had to work during the day and go to school at night and going an extra year was NOT an option for me. It sucked to be on the hook for so much money when society didn't really make any room for me to actually learn and excel in that environment. I suppose you could join the military. However, the military isn't for everyone. I don't know if would have had the mental fortitude to make it. Also, you lose out on some extremely productive years. I know a lot of ex-soldiers who have severe disabilities, both mental and physical, from their time in training / on the field. Also, forcing everyone who wants to go into higher education into a propaganda mill isn't exactly a great idea either. Also, the military doesn't just give you a credit card to go to any school you want. I had friends in school who struggled with the gi-bill system. 0: A term I an loathe to use, because I do not think other work is "dumb work", but it is a useful short-hand for workers who are working in jobs that require advanced education.
• jdkee 5y ago
  What is also problematic is the gender imbalance on campuses which was further exacerbated by the pandemic. See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-college-decline-gender-gap-higher-education/620066/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...
• eljimmy 5y ago
  I checked the tuition fees for my university CS degree and it's now just over $10,000 CAD per year for a bachelor. That's actually not that bad of an increase considering I was paying around $6,000 CAD about 15 years ago. I presume there are cheap colleges and universities in the states as well that are just as educational as the big name schools.
• morelandjs 5y ago
  I think most of us can agree that the bandaid fixes aren’t work for young Americans. The system needs a significant overhaul, both financially and culturally.
• supperburg 5y ago
  Americans are such colossal idiots. I can say it because I’m an American. They think, god what kind of evil and stupid person would EVER send their kid to private high school? It’s stuck-up, snobby, and the education at the free public school is just as good! Oh but in college my children must have nothing but the best and make connections with lots of important people and if it costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars then it’s worth every penny and anyone who doubts that is a fool. The disaster that our colleges are in is caused by this fear of missing out, the mental disease of the common idiot. If I had kids it would be the best private schools and tutoring up until college and I wouldn’t pay a penny for college unless it was a physics major. If you truly educate your kids from 0 to 18 then they really don’t need college.
• granzymes 5y ago
  Down 6.6% from Fall 2019. This is likely some combination of Covid making college temporarily less attractive (the social connections are just as important as the education) and lower-income students who have families that need them during the pandemic (community college enrollment dropped by a higher 13%). I would expect enrollment (at least at 4-year universities) to fully recover once the pandemic is well and truly over.
• tinus_hn 5y ago
  Did people really expect no consequences of asking students to pay full price to watch videos?
• hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Is it telling that there is no breakdown by gender? Men seem to have been abandoning education for a while now.
  • CountDrewku 5y ago
    Yeah I feel the current education system is set up to support women more. When gender doesn't exist then that breakdown no longer matters...
• aquanext 5y ago
  If I had it to do over again, I never would have taken out such big loans; instead I would have opted for the cheapest community college. But I was young and had never managed money before. I had no understanding of what I was signing up for. I actually went to a super overpriced art school ($30k/year) and realized about halfway through that I was never going to be able to pay it back. So I left and started working. That was probably the right decision because paying back $60k plus interest has been insane. I've spent all this time (15 years so far) paying back everything and still have $30k left (all interest!) and I can't imagine if I had to pay back $120k + interest. If I had stayed, by this point, I would have fled to a third-world country and changed my identity to avoid having to pay it back long ago – or killed myself. It is criminal what they have done to people. Absolutely criminal.
• muaytimbo 5y ago
  Easy explanation, who wants to pay for a masked/zoom college experience? Add jab requirements every couple months, “covid” surveillance and contact tracing, and intentionally minimized social activities/opportunities and why would anyone pay 50k/yr for that?
  • hbn 5y ago
    I also think millennials were the sacrificial generation who were forced to find out the hard way that college isn't the magical path to a great, well-paying career like they were promised. They did everything right, exactly as the generation before them who it worked for. They got expensive degrees, sunk themselves into crippling debt right as they were entering adulthood, only to find out most of the degrees they were sold are worthless. The new generation that's supposed to be entering college now can clearly see how badly millennials got scammed, why would they do the same thing as them? Not to mention the absolutely deranged politics that are taking place in academic institutions these days. The current sales pitch of college is "give us tens of thousands of dollars so you can watch some online classes with information you could find freely on the internet, we'll occasionally get you to write essays about how you were born inherently toxic as a person, and then at the end we give you a piece of paper that won't get you a job." No shit, attendance is going down. Unless you have a very specific plan for a career you want to get into, and you know it's a job that would actually be worth the money spent (like a computer science degree so you can get into a software career), it's just such an obviously horrible deal.
• jimmar 5y ago
  Children of affluent parents are still going to college at very high rates. The people suffering most from the expense of college are those who would benefit most from a college degree. Whatever the causes, people with college degree earn much more over their lifetimes than people without degrees. The trend in lower college enrollment seems like it will only exacerbate wealth disparities.
• jxramos 5y ago
  We have a family member who's decided to sit this quarter out, they sat last quarter out too. I'm curious how universities are juggling the leaves, I know they always permitted limited leaves but the must be facilitating the process to some degree I'd think.
• abeppu 5y ago
  The bizarre thing with higher education costs that no one's really explained to me is why schools simultaneously spend more and more on administrators (who are full time staff), and push more and more teaching to adjuncts. The claim I've heard justifying the growth of administration staff is that regulatory compliance becomes more onerous over time. But no school is judged on their regulatory compliance. In industry, we often want to make sure that the core value is staff, and stuff that you have to do but won't distinguish you, you may as well contract out. So why aren't administrative compliance obligations contracted out to some overseas firm? We've gotten to the point where it would actually be cheaper for students to hire their own adjunct to each them 1:1, than to go to some universities. Updating with numbers: - USC tuition is >$60k/yr - Adjunct professors in CA apparently earn $34-$43k/yr https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/ https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/ https://www.salary.com/research/salary/recruiting/adjunct-professor-salary/ca https://www.salary.com/research/salary/recruiting/adjunct-pr...
  • skrbjc 5y ago
    It’s interesting because universities over-produce academics for the number of tenure-track jobs available, so they then hire those phds back into adjunct positions, which is often the only academic job available to them, especially if they don’t want to move across the country to some small college in the middle of nowhere. So many phds just suck it up and take the adjunct jobs teaching undergrads. Actual professors at research universities aren’t really even doing teaching as their primary job. Their primary job is to do research and publish, which is how they progress in their career. But universities need people to teach so they hire adjuncts to teach undergrads, especially the entry level courses. In regards to admin costs, just look at UC Berkeley, they now have a $25 million dollar diversity department that hires nearly a hundred staff, all making over $50k and getting access to the pension system. Lots of people will say departments like this are a good thing, but there’s no question these departments cost a lot of money and inflate administrative costs. Berkeley has 1 staff member for every 2 students at this point. Look at this: “ Establishment of a Supplier Diversity Program at an institution is required when an organization is receiving federal funding for contracts or subcontracts as dictated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARS). The delegation of authority to manage the program is issued through the Office of the President (UCOP) policy.” Talk about regulation causing bloat, to take federal contracts you need to establish an office that tracks and reports the diversity of your contractors. No wonder costs have skyrocketed. https://supplychain.berkeley.edu/supplier-diversity-faqs https://supplychain.berkeley.edu/supplier-diversity-faqs
• irrational 5y ago
  50 years? Weren’t the baby boomers still in college 50 years ago? Is this just natural from fewer babies being born in the early 2000s?
• joshstrange 5y ago
  I believe strongly in education but most colleges are just money grabs. They charge ridiculously high rates that most people will take decades to pay off if ever. It's quite disgusting how we trick 17-19 year olds into taking on huge amounts of debt before they really have any idea what they are getting themselves into. On top of that, for certain professions, what is taught in colleges is an absolute joke. Computer science at my college had zero connection to what happens in the real world and I'm being completely honest when I tell you I can't think of a single thing I learned in college that I use in the real world. Even some of the more advanced types/concepts would be better taught in a ~1hr tutorial or video than how it was taught in my college. I'm all for giving people a broad education (I think I liked my non-technical/math/science classes more than the ones pertaining to the major I was working towards) and I think college should do a better job preparing people for the "real world" (budgeting, meal planning, conflict resolution, etc - So should high schools). I dropped out my junior year after being frustrated at feeling like I was wasting my time in classes that didn't prepare me. It was one the best decision I've ever made. I still got saddled with 3 years of debt but better than 4 and having no advantage at the end of it. I've never had an issue finding a job over the past decade+ and I'm making very good money (more than people I know who did graduate). We need massive college reform in this country.
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  Personally I would not have gotten any value of university in COVID times where there is virtually no 'campus life' and extra curricular. I've heard this from a lot of kids going through this and I would not be surprised if that's the main driver versus this article's main point of short term work $ versus long term career $. One of the interviewed kids said "he was tired of remote learning." I can't find any surveys just googling around if anyone has a source? for me, education alone would not be worth private school $, or even University of CO money (not science or maths). I barely learned anything from my major subject classes. I learned a ton from living on campus, doing my sport, student government, being an RA, interning and then working on political campaigns. probably some HN bias I think most here are probably more self starter, more intelligent. Plus college is about learning about yourself. Hard to become an independent adult when you're living in your parents house doing Zoom all day.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I still haven't seen a real analysis why college has become so f....ing expensive over the last decades. I find it hard to understand why this is being accepted.
• ctime 5y ago
  "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain My biggest gripe is the astronomical cost and debt burden that has vastly outpaced inflation. The university system in the U.S. has been taken hostage by greedy interests that push all kinds of bullshit costs on to students and have lost sight of exactly why the university exists in the first place - to educate. Not to house, not to entertain, not to keep fit, but to educate those that want to learn. If universities would stop with the non-sense "campus life" and focus more on a their core mission (like universities in Germany, for example) they might not have ended up in this predictable mess. This level of enrollment decline only means one thing for universities: Layoffs and shrinking budgets. You can't squeeze any more blood out of these students.
• CountDrewku 5y ago
  Good. The entire college infrastructure is junk. It probably has its place but no in its current iteration. The onus for training needs to be put on the businesses themselves. This is better for everyone including the businesses themselves. Putting in training requirements and a probationary period where new hires have to meet a certain threshold or be let go. The individual can then decide how best to learn.
• mproud 5y ago
  Don’t get me wrong, parents and guidance counselors should be looking out for kids, but I agree, colleges are mostly to blame.
• adolph 5y ago
  From the source [0]: Higher education enrollment fell a further 2.7 percent in the fall of 2021 following a 2.5 percent drop in the preceding fall. Continued enrollment losses in the pandemic represent a total two-year decline of 5.1 percent or 938,000 students since fall 2019. In the linked PDF, they note they don't have complete data on international students. "In recent years, IPEDS enrollments in the nonresident alien category have accounted for nearly five percent of all IPEDS enrollments." Fall 2017 Fall 2018 Fall 2019 Fall 2020 Fall 2021 All Sectors -1.0% -1.7% -1.3% -2.5% -2.7% Public 2-year -1.7% -3.2% -1.4% -10.1% -3.4% Public 4-year -0.2% 0.0% -1.2% 0.2% -3.0% Private nonprofit 4-year -0.4% 2.4% -0.6% -0.1% -1.6% Private for-profit 4-year -7.1% -15.1% -2.1% 5.3% -9.3% https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estimates/ https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estima...
• vvG94KbDUtRa 5y ago
• Animats 5y ago
  The product colleges sell is guaranteed entry to the middle class. Since they no longer can provide that, especially at the two year college level, their market is shrinking. What we need is a better life for the working class, not more college. Start by getting serious about wage and hour laws, and start throwing employers in jail.
• dhairya 5y ago
  This article is predicated on the assumption that immediately going to college after graduating high school is important. The pandemic skews the decision calculus greatly for many students ranging from safety to finding short-term employment enough for their current situation. If college is important factor in improving economic outcomes, it shouldn't matter if you go to college at 18 or take a few years go at the age of 21 or even later in life. We have this stigma around adults who get a college degree later in life. I've met a several people who went to college as older adults (one at the age of 26 and the other at the age of 30) and ended up having highly lucrative careers. My mom got her masters at the age 55 (and rightfully lorded over my sister and I that if she get her degree with straight A while holding down a job, being a mom and in her 50s, then we have no excuses). I believe college is valuable (though greatly overpriced in the US) but you don't need to be a young adult to attend. In terms of the labor effect of having fewer college graduates available for the labor market, honestly most jobs don't really require a college degree (including office and white collar jobs). Employers tend to use college degrees as cheap filtering signal instead having better hiring processes. Most entry level jobs have onboarding and training where college knowledge is not a perquisite for success.
• davidw 5y ago
  I wonder how this compares to, say, a basket of European countries, which don't suffer from some of the cost problems that US universities do.
• kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  There aren't many mentions of international students, many of whom are struggling very hard to get visa appointments abroad. US Embassies are still barely functioning and are not able to provide even the minimum of services they did before covid, if they're even open to the public at all.
• henrikschroder 5y ago
  How come none of the top comment threads talk about what a complete joke university education is currently due to ridiculous corona restrictions? Everyone is vaccinated, everyone is boosted, everyone wears their little masks, and they're still going remote, quarantining, and forbidding students from doing pretty much anything except sit in their dorms and watch remote teaching material. Is it any wonder that a lot of students walk away? Everything that makes college fun is forbidden. Why the hell would you put up with that? If I want to sit in my room, not party, and watch education videos all day, why would I pay $50k for the privilege? This is bullshit, and students aren't idiots, which is why a lot of them are dropping out and postponing their education until universities get their shit together.
• falcor84 5y ago
  I just came here to complain about the grammar of "More than 1 million fewer", it took me way too much wheel-spinning to parse. I would have gone with "Over 1M fewer" or even just "1M fewer" - we can handle the lack of precision.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  One month it's "too much student debt...blah, blah, blah" the next month it's "a significant number of student-aged people are no longer willing invest in something that results in too much debt and not enough return." It can't be both ways. Unless of course you're the Higher Edu Industrial Complex and you know NPR and their ilk have no memory and no integrity. Yes, there's some concern. There always is. But that doesn't make shamelessly crafting two opposing narratives.
• Goosee 5y ago
  Here is a solution that avoids the 'noise' university environments create. Ideally: 1. Attend an in-state university. 2. Look at your school's graduation report, which surveys students by major on their starting salary 3. Choose a program with a high starting salary 4. Take all general education classes online at a community college, starting the summer after high school graduation This is the most probable way to achieve a high roi on college, for an average american.
• voz_ 5y ago
  I know a lot of the comments here are from the lens of money input (as a cost, to pay for education) and output (as a return, on the investment, in the form of a job / career). However, I wanted to take a step back and offer a different perspective. College does more than teach one a trade. It should, ideally, help the student become a better citizen of their own culture, of the world, and of their community. College taught me deeper empathy, and different kinds of empathy, it taught me more about literature, history, cultures, anthropology. There is so much today that could be improved if, for example, philosophy was a core requirement of every CS curriculum. Outside of coursework, It taught me how to make friends, and how when I did bad things, I would lose friends. In a way, it is a continuation of high school except with the training wheels off, with all the consequences of adulthood to be tasted for the very first time. I know it is a privilege to say this, and it is why I am such a huge proponent of free education, but to miss college is to miss more than some academic study in a field. It is to miss a whole chapter of life. To go from high school to labor, without that sweet blissful blend of freedom, stress, and discovery feels like a life not fully lived. I would love for everyone to experience this, so from this personal perspective, I find that this framing (of money), on the whole, a rather negative thing.
• godmode2019 5y ago
  I don't see this as a problem. We certainly have a case of elite over production in the west. Where people study liberal arts and except a high paying job, and any job that they get will not ever pay the off the loan. Obama explains it the best. (Ignore the right wing title its a good video of him on his first visit to Kenya) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fItxli7-uU0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fItxli7-uU0 Starts at 15:13
• thecatster 5y ago
  Might be in general, but for Ivy League and higher schools, they've seen record application numbers. I got denied from MIT and was told that they won't even refer due to the enormous amounts of applicants.
• malwarebytess 5y ago
  It's Covid. Nobody wants to go to college on Zoom. People have postponed their education because of this stupid boomer shit so expect a boom when restrictions end.
• crate_barre 5y ago
  It’s just embarrassing to be educated but not well employed (a dignified job). The tide had to shift the other way.
• songzme 5y ago
  Universities are places where you go for intellectual pursuit of your interests, which is why majors like "study of russian history", "Anthropology And Archeology" exists. The major may be useless for employment, but the study helps preserve history and can be very interesting for the students who are passionate about it. Somehow, society wrongly started associating universities for corporate job preparation. I think people are starting to realize that if you want to get prepared for work, you should go to a trade training (like bootcamps). If you are priviledged enough to pursue your interests, then universities are a great place to be.
• pandeiro 5y ago
  Why not wait until COVID hysteria is over? Seems like the right call.
• user249 5y ago
  I'm not sure why it's so surprising that college enrollment is down when 30% of the country thinks colleges teach cultural marxism and want to turn their daughters into lesbians and their boys into girls
• jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Since statistics statements can look very misleading, I kneejerk-thought "it could be there are fewer people and thus students, due to population growth slowing or reversing, or it could be it's unaffordable or unpromising?". I hope it's from slowed population growth, but suppose it's the cost.
• jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  Even computer science education does not prep the median student for successfully passing interviews these days.
• fleddr 5y ago
  Sure enough the American college system is rotten, but let's also shed some light on financial literacy. We'll use "Brian" from the article. Brian can't be bothered to enroll into college because he's tired of remote learning. Yes, remote learning sucks. Doesn't mean you should stop. I'm bothered by this optionality. Later in life you're going to do a lot of things that suck, but have to do anyway. Further, at such young age, I would expect some hawkish parent to "help out" with the choice, but I guess I'm old fashioned. Fine, though. Delaying enrollment whilst earning some cash in the meanwhile is not the end of the world. And so Brian starts work at Jimmy's sandwiches. Then comes his mastermind move: he starts work at an Amazon warehouse for slightly more pay, yet needs to buy a car to get there. For which he takes a loan. I imagine many Americans don't even blink at this, but it's absolutely moronic. The very point of the break from school was to earn cash. Instead of saving it up, he's now in debt for the car, works a shit job, and comes short both for his "needs" and for college. Brian seems to have some self awareness at this point: "It's so hard," he says. "I'm just like, 'Wow, if I go to school, I'm going to take time off and I'm not going to have any money for things I need.'" Yeah, Brian, Wow indeed. Typical for American consumer culture: spending above your means from the very start.
• WaitWaitWha 5y ago
  I can see this being a problem for colleges & universities. Is this a problem for society?
• cush 5y ago
  Good. It's a waste of money for most people, and not worth literally living in poverty. It's great that students have stopped falling for the scam.
• thehappypm 5y ago
  Expensive, but low tier, private schools are the problem. They’re all over the Northeast. Schools that cost as much as Harvard, with way worse financial aid, with worse programs than Rutgers. It’s a scam with a quad.
  • danny_codes 5y ago
    This is just a symptom. College in America is an example of a market failure induced by government intervention. Federal loan guarantees and special rules around student loans (critically, they are not absolvable via bankruptcy) have caused a distorted market, whereby the colleges are incentivized to compete with each other for these guaranteed loans. Remember the student is a child, likely 17. They almost certainly have never supported themselves financially, and almost certainly have no conception of what a $200,000 loan will look like 10 years down the road. So you have colleges who are _guaranteed_ to get $200,000 from these poor students. You'd have to be some crazy altruist not to exploit that! However, imagine a world in which no such federally-guaranteed loans existed (and critically where absolvable by bankruptcy). In this case, no rational bank would loan a student 200k. The financials simply aren't there. Now students have to look around for funding options in the private market, which is only going to cut loans it believes will turn a profit: that is, loans to students who they believe will be able to pay them back. We have built a flawed economic model here: it is guaranteed to fail. The only solution is to overhaul this market either via novel market design or via nationalization. The choices of individual schools is mostly irrelevant: as market players, all they can do is play the game. The game is bad, and so the schools' decisions have bad outcomes.
    • thehappypm 5y ago
      I’m surprised nobody has proposed tuition caps, with the consequence of not being allowed to give out loans if total costs exceed some amount.
• rob_c 5y ago
  And now we hit the difficult question, is every degree really worth the value people pay for it?
• jnmandal 5y ago
  I'm not convinced this is a bad thing honestly.
• legohead 5y ago
  Community college according to Hege Ferguson, director of admissions for Florida State University, as of January 7, 2022, they have received 67,291 first-year applications for summer and fall semesters. That is a 21.2% increase compared to January 7, 2021, when they had received 55,500 applications.
• pesraka 5y ago
• mcdermott 5y ago
  Based on experience interviewing many job candidates over the past 5 years, college degrees are no longer an indicator or knowledge, abilities or intelligence. It seems like a four year degree today means almost nothing, I'm not sure what they are teaching these days beyond woke activism, but it's not working. On average I'd rather hire someone that received high school diploma in the 1990s and has a little experience than recent collage graduates.
• michaelrhansen 5y ago
  An estimate to replacement a house window for me was $3K. I asked if they were hiring and they were - starting hourly rate $35 / hour.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• nwmcsween 5y ago
  Yep it's going to get worse as well and it's not trades its inequality, how can someone making $10-15/hr pay for $10k tuition and astronomical rise in CoL..
• peter303 5y ago
  Down 28% since 2012 (19.8 M to 14.4 M) as stock market booms. Long term issue.
• AdrianEGraphene 5y ago
  Wow! I don't blame today's students. The virtual environment would not be what one expects when dedicating their life to schooling.
• alienalp 5y ago
  You can't become a doctor without going med and there are many other degrees like that however for like Physics, maths, CS etc... collage is rather like a big club in its ways and it is not for everybody. Rather it is for very few people actually. In countries like mine people go to collage because job quality is seriously low. It is ridicules that in first comment someone complaints about forklift jobs pays as much as first year teacher. That is really what needed so the people who shouldn't be a teacher doesn't go to collage for economical reasons so people who should be a teachers become a teacher.
• pingsl 5y ago
  China is on the opposite, for example, there will be over 10 million college graduates in China in the coming summer. However, Chinese graduates are in a similar situation as US college graduates. It's hard to find a decent job with a college degree. The college degree was once the premium but now more like a baseline in many industrials. Now China wants to push more young men to go to the professional education track. But the challenge is there are more issues in professional education than in college education here.
• anovikov 5y ago
  Finally, people got to realise the college is bs and is only designed to suck money out of them, putting them forever in debt. What's the problem about it? It will help those who choose college, too - as demand for education falls, so will the prices.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  In my geo-region this trend extends back at least 7 or 8 years in Community colleges. Roughly a 20% decrease. Only about 1/3 of that since COVID. At the same time traditional 4-year schools have been mostly flat on enrollment. Whatever is causing this, it's ok part of a much bigger trend than can be explained by COVID, which has exacerbated but not caused this trend.
• unobatbayar 5y ago
  Not sure how to feel about education and healthcare being a trillion dollar industry. When will we realise that people's lives are far more important than money.
• softsound 5y ago
  Why go to college when bootcamps can be faster and less risky? They can have better terms then a lot of college debt with set time limits and payment amounts for debt. Colleges are so behind the times... I'd recommend them more for social skills and networking then anything though. I'm not against colleges just think a lot of them are out of touch and not worth it. I make a good salary now in STEM but never got around to a 4 year degree. I'm not against it but certainly understand why people don't go, it just takes a while and can be hard to tell if it's worth it. If it's affordable and you have don't have much else to do I'd recommend it, moreso if you come from a well off background. If you don't have a lot going for you though, take a trade school route or find a bootcamps with terms you think are agreeable and do a lot of side projects. Then decide if college is worth it. The eariler you make money the less stress you'll have long term.
• 02020202 5y ago
• viktorcode 5y ago
  > "That could be the beginning of a whole generation of students rethinking the value of college itself." Given the cost of education in the US, the value of college is questionable indeed.
• sirwitti 5y ago
  This headline is worded in a way that makes it quite hard to grasp its meaning. I guess I just like simple language.
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  This isn't necessarily a bad thing. University isn't for everyone, and thankfully many instead pursue skilled trades (which benefits society as well as the tradesman). If the mantra is that everyone should go to university, then it becomes an extension of high school, and the credentials less valuable... and mostly the student loan industry thrives.
• jbergens 5y ago
  I can interpolate. It has dropped with about 2 million students in 6 years, that is 3 millions per year. There are currently (according to the article) 14.4 million undergraduates to it will reach 0 in about 43.2 years. Zero undergraduates in 2065. You heard it here first! /j
• exdsq 5y ago
  Good! There is an oversupply of graduates and the debt bubble is just growing. This is a step in the right direction.