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The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades. It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced

The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades. It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans. The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway. Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you.

aehrhawrg 3y ago
This position would have more merit if it held equally true across all degrees. Not counting the inevitable graduates in every field that don't pan out, is it actually equally true for every degree though? Usually when I see people unable to pay their student loans it's my friends who went for the humanities or the soft sciences. The people who chose their degree by treating it as an investment they wanted as high a return as possible from generally did well.
- beej71 3y ago
  There are a lot of degrees that fail to pay enough to cover the loans required to get them, e.g. teacher, speech language pathologist, etc. And that's a bummer because we need people like that. So we apply bandaids like PSLF to make those degrees viable. It's a mess.
js8 3y ago
> The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you. Sure, that's totally not gonna be another gold rush / pyramid scheme like the student loans were.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  Learning a trade and then management is a very slow gold rush
throw9away6 3y ago
Business isn’t so easy. Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses, health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3. If you just factor in taxes and healthcare that’s probably 50-60% right off the top.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses ... If you actually ran a small business, you would understand that small businesses are exempted from many of these regulations. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't apply until your business has more than 15 employees. Insider trick --- start multiple small companies to avoid many of these sort of regulations. health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3. If this is true, you really aren't very successful. Also, health care costs are a deductible business expense.
Workaccount2 3y ago
College definitely has historically paid off, people have just been impatient with the return timeline. The fruits of a degree don't start to really manifest until your 30's, assuming you got a practical degree. They become undeniable by your 50's. Going forward though, I think the combination of AI and extreme degree dilution (everybody has a degree) are going to absolutely railroad a bunch of gen-z kids down the line.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  It is not the timeline that is the problem, but the volatility. Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met." So you're throwing yourself at a credential that businesses use as an application checkbox and hoping for the best. That's a lot of debt to incur the name of hope.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met." With recent changes to the income-based repayment terms on federal loans, and if, like the vast majority of loan-dependent students those are your only loans, its pretty close (and, at worst, if yo can’t the repayment won’t cost anything.)
tivert 3y ago
> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans. I think you're over-reacting to some anecdotes. > The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway. > Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. To put it bluntly: that's dumb advice that also takes contrarianism to an unreasonable extreme. IMHO, the more reasonable reaction the situation is to steer your kids towards an affordable college and a degree path that has a reasonable career at the other end. So towards a decent but unprestigious state school, away from no-name private liberal arts schools and famous schools (unless you they can score a fantastic scholarship); way from majoring in anthropology, literature, or music; etc. Edit: Also it doesn't seem super wise, period, to advise your kid to go into some low skill/low capital business, then expect them to magically make a successful small business out of it. If people actually took your advice in large numbers, the competition is going to be cutthroat.
- gspencley 3y ago
  IMHO the more reasonable reaction is to take an objective look at what you want to do with your life and a hard look at what the requirements are for achieving that. Some fields require a post-secondary education. You can't get around that. If you want to be an engineer or a doctor, you need to go that route. In that case, I agree with you. Look for more affordable options and figure out how to meet the requirements without bankrupting yourself. Understand what you are getting involved in before you make any commitments. Barring the above, I do tend to side with the OP that it is time for a cultural shift away from college / university for the sake of college / university. I know of a lot of people who really valued "the experience", and felt like they found themselves and made valuable networking connections etc. and value those things above the diploma itself. None of that is a bad thing, but ask yourself what kind of dollar amount you are willing to pay for that. Don't assume that you will be resigned to living under the poverty line if you don't pursue that. I am undoubtedly biased because I have enjoyed a 25 year career in software engineering and this is a niche field where we see tons of self-taught engineers who, in many cases, have a higher work ethic and measurable productive output than their college educated peers. I don't pretend for a second that that can transfer to every other field. But does that mean the idea transfers to zero other fields? You don't have to disvalue higher education to question whether or not traditional formal institutions are providing the value that they promise, or to seek alternative ways of achieving that higher education.
themagician 3y ago
I think higher education is still important. What I have noticed is that "entrepreneur" in the age of social media has become almost synonymous with scams—doubly so among those without a college degree. I can't even avoid it. Every time I open Facebook or Instagram, every 3rd or 5th post is some kind of scam. The vast majority or reels are scams. People aren't aspiring to be landscapers or start real businesses and a lot of people don't even know the difference between a real business and some kind of scam that they saw on TikTok. Higher education also doesn't have to be expensive. It can be as expensive as you want it to be, even today. You can get a great education from a state school. You can even offload the first two years to community college if you really want to save money.
jcpst 3y ago
That doesn’t work for everyone though. I work for an employer because I don’t want to spend time running a business. It’s just not worth it for a lot of us. I don’t even ever want to be a manager. I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want.
- tigeroil 3y ago
  I feel like this is a massively underappreciated view in general. I always see people talking about how brilliant it is to run your own business / be your own boss, but I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day. I say this as a director of a SaaS company...
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day. There's more value in finishing and going home by noon --- or not even leaving the house at all if you don't feel like it. I know people without a college degree who do this and make very good money.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want. If you think like a corporate slave, that is what you will always be --- looking forward to the next layoff. One of my neighbors runs a landscape business --- no college dregree. He has 8 crews and a manager. I'll bet he makes more than you and spends less time doing it. He works about 3 hours a day --- which mostly involves riding around to make sure the work is getting done as he talks to clients on phone.
  - jcpst 3y ago
    Ok. Am I supposed to feel bad now? It’s fine if you’re neighbor makes more than me. I bet I have other neighbors that make more than me too. I bet your neighbor didn’t just decide to own a landscaping business and went straight to his 3 hour days with 8 crews. Guess what- I worked for myself for 7 years. I had some good times. I like my “corporate slave” job better. I work when I want and where I want. It doesn’t even have to be 40hrs. I don’t really deal with customers or deadlines, or making sure other people do their job. I’m not worried about layoffs. And I’m not wishing for one so I can escape. My boss is the shit. The people high up know me by reputation. They don’t want to lose me. They know I could easily be working for a competitor. So, what else is wrong with me preferring an employer over working for myself?
runako 3y ago
This ignores that the reason that people started pushing their kids to college was that the odds are better with a degree than without, and that still broadly holds over a long career. There never have been any guarantees, but the odds in the USA do not favor folks with only a high school education. For example, people talk about "landscaping or construction" and other trades but don't consider that working as e.g. an economist has a longer expected career longevity than working in construction. Also remember that the point of college is to broadly educate the individual, not to be a jobs program. That said, there's no reason a college graduate can't start and grow a construction business. A person who makes $200k at a data science job is in some ways better positioned to start a construction business, because they have the ability to accumulate some capital.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held No, it hasn’t, as evidenced by the research on pay differentials. > Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. Entrepreneurship requires capital, and also has a high failure rate; a business of those types can also lead to failure, a worse than starting position, and being back to being a worker in those industries.
nineplay 3y ago
> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135 Yesterday this was posted with a lot of commenters agreeing that management wasn't for them. With that in mind, I think presenting "entrepreneurism" as a lucrative and rewarding career is misleading. Many people wouldn't enjoy it, many people wouldn't be good at it, many people will not be successful at it - particularly long term. Entrepreneurs will not have easy access to 401ks and ( in the US ) health insurance. > landscaping or construction It is interesting to me how many promoters of blues collar careers overlook these industries historic hostility to female collogues. Women have been doing better in college lately than men, so maybe the assumption is that men will forgo college in droves for these sort of trade careers leaving all the white collar jobs to women. It's a plausible outcome.
arethuza 3y ago
"The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades." Well, the CS degree I got in the UK in the 1980s cost me literally nothing - no fees and a full grant for living expenses (which I added to by working in the summer breaks). Given the amount of tax I've paid, that was an excellent investment by the UK taxpayer!
jakelazaroff 3y ago
> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. The key word is "can". About 20% of businesses will fail in a year; about half will fail in five [1]. That means that unless everyone is a serial entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs will still end up needing to work a "traditional" job for most of their careers. [1] https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt

aehrhawrg 3y ago

This position would have more merit if it held equally true across all degrees. Not counting the inevitable graduates in every field that don't pan out, is it actually equally true for every degree though? Usually when I see people unable to pay their student loans it's my friends who went for the humanities or the soft sciences. The people who chose their degree by treating it as an investment they wanted as high a return as possible from generally did well.

beej71 3y ago
There are a lot of degrees that fail to pay enough to cover the loans required to get them, e.g. teacher, speech language pathologist, etc. And that's a bummer because we need people like that. So we apply bandaids like PSLF to make those degrees viable. It's a mess.

js8 3y ago

> The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you. Sure, that's totally not gonna be another gold rush / pyramid scheme like the student loans were.

kevinmchugh 3y ago
Learning a trade and then management is a very slow gold rush

throw9away6 3y ago

Business isn’t so easy. Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses, health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3. If you just factor in taxes and healthcare that’s probably 50-60% right off the top.

jqpabc123 3y ago
Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses ... If you actually ran a small business, you would understand that small businesses are exempted from many of these regulations. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't apply until your business has more than 15 employees. Insider trick --- start multiple small companies to avoid many of these sort of regulations. health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3. If this is true, you really aren't very successful. Also, health care costs are a deductible business expense.

Workaccount2 3y ago

College definitely has historically paid off, people have just been impatient with the return timeline. The fruits of a degree don't start to really manifest until your 30's, assuming you got a practical degree. They become undeniable by your 50's. Going forward though, I think the combination of AI and extreme degree dilution (everybody has a degree) are going to absolutely railroad a bunch of gen-z kids down the line.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
It is not the timeline that is the problem, but the volatility. Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met." So you're throwing yourself at a credential that businesses use as an application checkbox and hoping for the best. That's a lot of debt to incur the name of hope.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met." With recent changes to the income-based repayment terms on federal loans, and if, like the vast majority of loan-dependent students those are your only loans, its pretty close (and, at worst, if yo can’t the repayment won’t cost anything.)

tivert 3y ago

> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans. I think you're over-reacting to some anecdotes. > The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway. > Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. To put it bluntly: that's dumb advice that also takes contrarianism to an unreasonable extreme. IMHO, the more reasonable reaction the situation is to steer your kids towards an affordable college and a degree path that has a reasonable career at the other end. So towards a decent but unprestigious state school, away from no-name private liberal arts schools and famous schools (unless you they can score a fantastic scholarship); way from majoring in anthropology, literature, or music; etc. Edit: Also it doesn't seem super wise, period, to advise your kid to go into some low skill/low capital business, then expect them to magically make a successful small business out of it. If people actually took your advice in large numbers, the competition is going to be cutthroat.

gspencley 3y ago
IMHO the more reasonable reaction is to take an objective look at what you want to do with your life and a hard look at what the requirements are for achieving that. Some fields require a post-secondary education. You can't get around that. If you want to be an engineer or a doctor, you need to go that route. In that case, I agree with you. Look for more affordable options and figure out how to meet the requirements without bankrupting yourself. Understand what you are getting involved in before you make any commitments. Barring the above, I do tend to side with the OP that it is time for a cultural shift away from college / university for the sake of college / university. I know of a lot of people who really valued "the experience", and felt like they found themselves and made valuable networking connections etc. and value those things above the diploma itself. None of that is a bad thing, but ask yourself what kind of dollar amount you are willing to pay for that. Don't assume that you will be resigned to living under the poverty line if you don't pursue that. I am undoubtedly biased because I have enjoyed a 25 year career in software engineering and this is a niche field where we see tons of self-taught engineers who, in many cases, have a higher work ethic and measurable productive output than their college educated peers. I don't pretend for a second that that can transfer to every other field. But does that mean the idea transfers to zero other fields? You don't have to disvalue higher education to question whether or not traditional formal institutions are providing the value that they promise, or to seek alternative ways of achieving that higher education.

themagician 3y ago

I think higher education is still important. What I have noticed is that "entrepreneur" in the age of social media has become almost synonymous with scams—doubly so among those without a college degree. I can't even avoid it. Every time I open Facebook or Instagram, every 3rd or 5th post is some kind of scam. The vast majority or reels are scams. People aren't aspiring to be landscapers or start real businesses and a lot of people don't even know the difference between a real business and some kind of scam that they saw on TikTok. Higher education also doesn't have to be expensive. It can be as expensive as you want it to be, even today. You can get a great education from a state school. You can even offload the first two years to community college if you really want to save money.

jcpst 3y ago

That doesn’t work for everyone though. I work for an employer because I don’t want to spend time running a business. It’s just not worth it for a lot of us. I don’t even ever want to be a manager. I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want.

tigeroil 3y ago
I feel like this is a massively underappreciated view in general. I always see people talking about how brilliant it is to run your own business / be your own boss, but I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day. I say this as a director of a SaaS company...
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day. There's more value in finishing and going home by noon --- or not even leaving the house at all if you don't feel like it. I know people without a college degree who do this and make very good money.
jqpabc123 3y ago
I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want. If you think like a corporate slave, that is what you will always be --- looking forward to the next layoff. One of my neighbors runs a landscape business --- no college dregree. He has 8 crews and a manager. I'll bet he makes more than you and spends less time doing it. He works about 3 hours a day --- which mostly involves riding around to make sure the work is getting done as he talks to clients on phone.
- jcpst 3y ago
  Ok. Am I supposed to feel bad now? It’s fine if you’re neighbor makes more than me. I bet I have other neighbors that make more than me too. I bet your neighbor didn’t just decide to own a landscaping business and went straight to his 3 hour days with 8 crews. Guess what- I worked for myself for 7 years. I had some good times. I like my “corporate slave” job better. I work when I want and where I want. It doesn’t even have to be 40hrs. I don’t really deal with customers or deadlines, or making sure other people do their job. I’m not worried about layoffs. And I’m not wishing for one so I can escape. My boss is the shit. The people high up know me by reputation. They don’t want to lose me. They know I could easily be working for a competitor. So, what else is wrong with me preferring an employer over working for myself?

runako 3y ago

This ignores that the reason that people started pushing their kids to college was that the odds are better with a degree than without, and that still broadly holds over a long career. There never have been any guarantees, but the odds in the USA do not favor folks with only a high school education. For example, people talk about "landscaping or construction" and other trades but don't consider that working as e.g. an economist has a longer expected career longevity than working in construction. Also remember that the point of college is to broadly educate the individual, not to be a jobs program. That said, there's no reason a college graduate can't start and grow a construction business. A person who makes $200k at a data science job is in some ways better positioned to start a construction business, because they have the ability to accumulate some capital.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held No, it hasn’t, as evidenced by the research on pay differentials. > Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. Entrepreneurship requires capital, and also has a high failure rate; a business of those types can also lead to failure, a worse than starting position, and being back to being a worker in those industries.

nineplay 3y ago

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135 Yesterday this was posted with a lot of commenters agreeing that management wasn't for them. With that in mind, I think presenting "entrepreneurism" as a lucrative and rewarding career is misleading. Many people wouldn't enjoy it, many people wouldn't be good at it, many people will not be successful at it - particularly long term. Entrepreneurs will not have easy access to 401ks and ( in the US ) health insurance. > landscaping or construction It is interesting to me how many promoters of blues collar careers overlook these industries historic hostility to female collogues. Women have been doing better in college lately than men, so maybe the assumption is that men will forgo college in droves for these sort of trade careers leaving all the white collar jobs to women. It's a plausible outcome.

arethuza 3y ago

"The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades." Well, the CS degree I got in the UK in the 1980s cost me literally nothing - no fees and a full grant for living expenses (which I added to by working in the summer breaks). Given the amount of tax I've paid, that was an excellent investment by the UK taxpayer!

jakelazaroff 3y ago

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases. The key word is "can". About 20% of businesses will fail in a year; about half will fail in five [1]. That means that unless everyone is a serial entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs will still end up needing to work a "traditional" job for most of their careers. [1] https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt