7 ms·

Gen Z is giving up on college

75 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

gmerc 3y ago
With AI heavily driving into knowledge jobs and the insane value extraction / rent seeking that’s going on in education in the US, that is not a surprise at all. It’s smart.
Mistletoe 3y ago
The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.
- 77pt77 3y ago
  Is that 35K for someone with a PhD?
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    A doctorate in lab technician? I highly doubt it.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    No a bachelors. Post docs with a PhD are expected to work for about 48k.
    - 77pt77 3y ago
      Wow! Thank you.
Racing0461 3y ago
That would be the correct assessment given the return of college vs the cost. Unless you want to be a doctor/lawyer/dentist/engineer, college isn't really worth it. and to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living on campus at a public 4-year in-state institution is $26,027 per year or $104,108 over 4 years.
  - reedf1 3y ago
    "...getting 10% returns like in the stock market..." You should start a fund!!
  - rikketikm 3y ago
    No one has 80k laying around when he/she's 18, your calculation doesn't make any sense.
    - MrPatan 3y ago
      Then no one can pay for college anyway
      - hef19898 3y ago
        But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?
        friend_and_foe 3y ago
        No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree, you wind up in a scenario where a nation wastes 4 years per generation only to wind up with the same economic landscape later. They'll cut these programs well before that happens. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
rikketikm 3y ago
How do you expect people to study humanities if you're making it inherently impossible?
- kimi 3y ago
  Should we expect people to study humanities? A lot of the best software is written by amateurs or hobbyists in their spare time. I'm sure there is plenty of experts on Greek tragedies just because they love it.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  I don't understand why people confuse studying with getting a diploma. You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany
  - CodinM 3y ago
    This is a green heron since the issue at hand isn't "oh but you can study without a diploma", the issue is "you won't be taken seriously because you don't have credentials" e.g. piece of paper.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      I mean, what credentials does a humanities graduate actually have? Who would need such knowledge in any job except for a humanities job itself?
      - theodric 3y ago
        Indeed, nobody takes us seriously regardless of what the paperwork says
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        The credential is that they were able to pass their classes, hopefully with good grades. Many employers want to know that you are the type of person who succeeds, not that you know some specific thing. University has basically taken the place of apprenticeships because employers don't want to train incompetent people, so they make you show competence with a degree.
dncornholio 3y ago
Wondering if social media is in part responsible. It seems you can make a lot of money as content creator, especially in NA. I don't understand or believe the COVID story.
- romanovcode 3y ago
  Survivorship bias. Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.
  - KronisLV 3y ago
    > Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money. Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine. Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")
- rightbyte 3y ago
  No. You need like 100000+ "fans"/regulars to live of your YouTube channel. So if a person follows 5 creators, 5 in 100 000 can live of that. We are talking piano tuner rarity here.
bdamm 3y ago
Fundamentally, college is about building skills and networking with people. Leveraging AI should be taught in all college curriculum since it is a power multiplier for everyone. This idea that AI is making college irrelevant is completely absurd to me.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  You can build skills and network with people on your computer, for free.
  - bdamm 3y ago
    There is no doubt that some people can succeed without the structure of a college institution, but many people do NOT. And not everyone knows the tricks for connecting with quality and knowledgeable people who are invested in your personal success. College provides a path for that. I don't think it says anything negative about people who choose to follow a college degree path. Rather, it speaks to the talent of people who succeed without it. There are many paths to a good and useful education. I personally went to a university and got a degree. And I know 100% that I would not have succeeded without it. That's my personal story; I've met plenty of people who succeed outside of that. Not everyone is the same or can take the same paths.
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      Well, from the current state of things, those people don't succeed with the institution either, which is why all the fuss. College is rather expensive for networking, rather time consuming and grueling if the education isn't the pitch. You say college is for the networking. That's not what the institutions are putting on the label.
skotobaza 3y ago
>"As a kid, you always imagine college will be a life-changing experience, and that your freshman year is where you'll get a chance to discover yourself" Well isn't that what happened exactly? He discovered that he wasn't really interested in studying computer science...
jamil7 3y ago
> Today, as most of his peers are starting their senior year of college, he's got more than $1 million in venture-capital funding. Is this meant to illustrate he's ahead in some way?
- Kiro 3y ago
  Is he not?
aetherspawn 3y ago
College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc. For the other unregulated fields its unsurprising considering that the quality of education was questionable compared with just reading half a dozen good books.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc. Agree wholeheartedly ! If you're going to college to "study" a mickey-mouse degree, then frankly you're wasting your time and your money. Mickey-mouse degrees can be readily taken care of through far more cost effective options: books, practical experience at home and apprenticeships/junior jobs. Employers are not stupid either. If you think a mickey-mouse degree is going to magically make you more employable then you're going to be in for a surprise.
mkl95 3y ago
As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.
- blowski 3y ago
  Online degrees seem to focus on teaching materials that are cheap to obtain elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to have seminars led by someone qualified, but I guess the numbers don’t add up for this.
  - mkl95 3y ago
    This lines up with my experience. In my case, the teaching materials were some PDFs with the typical content recycled from old textbooks. The price tag was hefty, which made it feel like a scam.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I can't imagine what it is like doing a degree these days in say CS, when the wealth of information on Youtube is incredible, and you can self-pace and learn interesting stuff. Postgrad would still be a different story.
  - komali2 3y ago
    I find youtube content to be very lowest common denominator and just a difficult form to learn from. There's open source comp sci curriculum that compile various MooCs and free college courses though that I thought was phenomenal: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
    - xboxnolifes 3y ago
      I agree that Youtube is very low quality (or non-existent) for most CS topics. I used Youtube (and other sources) often went I studied CS in college, but it was a constant search for the source that covered concepts relevant to what I was studying. Youtube has a plethora of videos on introductory CS concepts, things that would be covered in the first 2-3 courses. After that, it's still very much a desert.
fabian2k 3y ago
There should be pretty large differences per country here if the costs are the major driving factor. Universities can be much cheaper or even free in other countries compared to the US.
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
Lumping students of useless liberal arts "degrees" together with those on their way to becoming neurosurgeons, quants, investment bankers, lawyers or strategy consultants is a disgusting media default I can not comprehend. You CAN NOT lump those together for an average. Different planets. Different universes. Besides that: Aren‘t colleges as full as ever? Any college has trouble to fill a new semester?
- tyroi34iooi 3y ago
  Old school "liberal arts" before 1970 was about processing information, finding bias, finding patterns, critical thinking... Very meta... It would be excellent preparation for profession where you deal with people and information (investment banking). Liberal arts of current year has nothing to do with that.
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    Little to no math though, which made it mostly a joke.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  West Virginia University has an enrollment crisis that lead to cutting a bunch of programs.
tyroi34iooi 3y ago
> They're not as interested in the typical "college experience" — whiling away four years rooming with friends and drinking at frat parties. They are, but college is not place to do that! People can not give a consent while drunk, at college you are definitely not getting away with it! > And many students are no longer drawn by the traditional mission of a liberal-arts education: to foster critical thinking and informed discourse. They are, but college is not place where liberal-arts education is! Last 4 years had shown that. Asking for evidence, or criticizing something, will get you in trouble at college!
dahart 3y ago
> Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not. In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn, which is a lot bigger than I thought before I looked it up. The Fed published the stats in an article a few years ago that was trying to suggest college was becoming not worth it, but once I looked at the raw data, it convinced me the other way. (This article has its own misleading comparisons by using ratios and ignoring absolutes, for example suggesting someone who saves 5x their salary is less well off than someone else who saves 6x their salary even when the 5x person has twice the income.) https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2019/10/15/is-college-still-worth-it-the-new-calculus-of-falling-returns.pdf https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
- erfgh 3y ago
  Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.
  - dahart 3y ago
    It’s not my statistic. It’s the Fed’s. They have a longer version of this report where they account for and try to calculate the causal value of college, which more or less does exactly what you’re suggesting. It’s in section III here: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college-worth-it/emmons_kent_ricketts_college_still_worth_it.pdf https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
  - AussieWog93 3y ago
    >Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked. A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (who can own their own businesses and earn $250k+). Yet when we're looking for a career for our kids, we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.
pharos92 3y ago
It's a real shame that cost has significantly outweighed the value derived from high education. It's in the interest of business to continue to add value and explore new territory. Unfortunately though this has metastasized in higher education to producing junk degrees and programs that simply do not warrant costly or even sometimes formal training. High education has evolved from something accessible only by the elite, or the brightest (elevated on the dime of the elite) to an overpriced commodity that yields little returns. Especially in undergrad, is the cost really worth it to achieve a basic level of competency that employers then have to build on significantly after the fact? My advice to young people in my home country (not USA) is only go if the profession you want requires it. And I'll often help them to do a cost-benefit-analysis to work out if college is the right path.
- taylorius 3y ago
  The primary interests of business are primarily making money. When capitalism works at it's best, the innovation and exploring of new territory is the mechanism by which companies gain an edge in the market. Unfortunately there are other, less useful ways of gaining market advantage (monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture etc). It's a problem of corruption. To quote Bill Burr - "The president makes 400 grand a year. He's supposed to keep billionaires in line?"
  - pharos92 3y ago
    Make money, yes. But it's hard (in a corruption free environment) to make money without providing a level of value.
    - taylorius 3y ago
      I'm sure that's true - and if I ever witness a corruption free environment, I shall verify! :-)
derelicta 3y ago
That's what happens when you keep telling a whole generation that it's their fault for having accumulated large amounts of debt, that they should have just chosen a "productive" degree and not something "useless" like Litterature or History. Gen Z is meant to be a productive generation, not an educated one. To hell with concepts such as upstanding citizens, as long as they are obedient at work :)
nottheengineer 3y ago
Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany. We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said this was very uncommon in their time, usually due to financial considerations. I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US. You get to pick once and if you pick wrong, it's worse than not going to college at all. Any other input on that? Mine is purely anecdotal and I didn't find any hard data to support or disprove my theory.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The world is rapidly growing in complexity Only if you work in stuff like tech, but the world still needs many other jobs like plumbers, police officers, etc. who's jobs don't change that fast.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Even tech, software and hardware, unless you develop said tech, the use for said tech didn't really change fundamentally since social media came around. And that arguably only affected media and advertizing. What is posing problems now is the necessary transition from our old "system" (Western OEMs using Asian suppliers and burning fossil fuels, to oversimplify it) to something different (politically, socially, economically and technologically). Seems somewhere between 25 and just shy of 50 percent of any given population have serious problems accepting and adapting to that.
  - com2kid 3y ago
    Have you seen modern plumbing? Solar heaters for water, grey water reclamation systems, hydronic heating, smart controllers for garden sprinklers. I've talked to quite a few very smart plumbers. The ones at the top of the field (earning good $) work with complex setups.
    - 3y ago
simonCGN 3y ago
Quite the US centred topic as university costs a fortune here.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Opportunity cost is a factor everywhere, though.
unwind 3y ago
I really have nothing against the Netherlands, but here [1] is the same link to the "main" US site. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-not-going-to-college-tuition-costs-higher-education-2023-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-not-going-to-college-t...
yolkedgeek 3y ago
I'm almost finnishing my bachelors in software engineering. I really wish I didn't have to waste all these years in university. I could've learned much more by self study. the traditional teaching system which is centuries old, is very bad and backwards. we have advanced in every aspect, we are reaching new milestones everyday, but our education system hasn't changed much from the start of time. this is awful.
- skotobaza 3y ago
  Can you give an example? I studied software engineering in university and it wasn't ideal but it gave me the most important stuff: the learning system and almost complete overview of software and hardware development used in computer science jobs. Most people who do self-study only learn a very small subset of this knowledge - one or two programming languages and frameworks and maybe a little bit of algorithms.
javilovesmambo 3y ago
My perspective of university has also degraded with time. I do not think it only has to do with the generation but with the universities themselves. A bit of context: I undertook my 1st undergraduate program from 2007 to 2011, did an erasmus on 2010-2011, masters on 2013-2014 and Phd from 214 to 2017. When I started at 2007 (in Spain), there was a lot of freedom. No need to go to lesson (only certain labs were compulsory), most of the the courses will not have any compulsory hand in course works. For 95% of my courses was enough to sit for the exam and pass it. Exams were difficult, rarely less than 2h and always 'unseen' problems. Failing was an option and we all experience it. You could always enroll again and try the year after. Another thing I had rarely experience afterwards, lecturer will treat you as an adult. They will talk to you as an adult, give you the freedom and expect you to behave as one. All these freedoms allow us to learn about ourselves, do you really enjoy the topics? Do you need to spend 3h a week listening to the teacher or are you better off dealing with a different subject? Do you need 1 week to prepare for an exam or rather 9 months? Making failure an option helped maintaining a high standard on learning outcome. There was no need to lower the bar so everyone could pass. Also getting fees were nearly null and there were plenty of scholarships. The idea was something like everyone should have the opportunity to go to university, but only those who were ready could obtain a degree. Later on, as I explored universities in other countries I felt it was more like, you can pay us X$ for Y years and at the end you get a shiny diploma. Then as I shifted into software engineering, I found all the resources I needed were online. That together with the fact that universities tend to be slow to introduce new material and shift content, plus the high costs, plus the little freedom they provide, plus the focus they have on money, make universities loose appeal.
gosenx 3y ago
I don't know if anyone feels the same, but lately I have been regretting not have _enjoyed university_ because I wanted to rush to get a job. There is so much knowledge to acquire getting a degree that I kinda think that there is some agenda of making this generation dumber and dumber. One of the things that college does well, is to teach stuff that you don't think you need, but that are so important for you. Those that only do what their brain wants, optimize for what is more comfortable to them while university takes you out of your comfort zone. Are there things that can be improved, yes! Of course. But go to college and have some fun learning.
poisonborz 3y ago
In terms of education, they're right. Unis became a relic in terms of giving up to date knowledge compared to the ""open"" market. What they chase is headcount and research funds, entangled in medieval rulesets and personnel with lifelong tenure (either by law or politics) who have little incentive to change. Few fields remain where they are unavoidable, like law or medical studies. In terms of social life, experiences, my heart breaks for them to miss this. Merely just the setting of getting off the chains of parents, while still not having to (that much) worry about finances and and just visiting lectures that interest you gives you a whole different scope of thinking.
theodric 3y ago
Attending university was extremely valuable to me: I got to escape my parents, hang out with other people of compatible interests, experience broadband for the first time, and best of all, meet my wife. Oh, and employers sometimes filter on 'has degree' vs 'no degree' when selecting who to interview. It hasn't seemed to matter that my degree (music, specifically music performance) was completely irrelevant to my chosen line of work, and has contributed nothing to my career. I should've just skipped class.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  It's hard to gauge what point you're making. You supposedly paid for class, if you could've skipped class and gotten all the benefit you got from it, did college give you the benefit, or was it just getting out in the world and being around people your age?
  - theodric 3y ago
    I'm saying that my life as I know it would be dramatically different, and probably worse, had I not gone to university, but all of the benefits I assign to having gone are peripheral (friends, spouse, weak employability marker) rather than direct (I learned something in class, related to my area of focus, that I was able to apply to my benefit in life). So it was worth going, but not because of The Great Education I Got There.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Young people are more attuned to where the wind is blowing, in part because they are part of the force that drives it, but generally because they're still learning how to navigate the world and don't have the privilege of not paying attention. You can get any book online for free. Any research paper. Any textbook. Any information you like that is known to more than a couple of people. You can even get almost all MIT coursework free, they give it to you. You. can get a full education watching videos and reading books online, for free. Illegal or no, if you are in it for the education and not for the credential you don't have to pay anyone for it anymore. As long as the internet exists this is a fact of life. Another fact of life is that only middling people get paid for credentials, the big bucks are earned by people that know what they're talking about and have some expertise. You need a credential to be mediocre, you need to excel at something to be excellent, and anybody that recognizes excellence doesn't need a piece of paper to confirm it. The rent seeking information brokers are all very mad about this of course. From news media to education to publishing, they're all clamoring something be done about it. But nothing can be done about it. They'll sell you the "college experience", the "need to stay informed", they'll guilt you, they'll try to scare you, but at best it buys them a little time. Nothing holds back the tide and their days are numbered as powerful institutions in our society.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The education isn't the point of college though. Employers are more interested in the credentialism than the education for the vast majority of jobs. Even in software engineering which works hard to avoid credentialism via leetcode and the like it's quite important. It's difficult to even get an interview at many(most?) firms without the degree.
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    Yeah, and part of what I'm saying is, if credential is more important for a job that capability then it's inefficient additional overhead, unless credential actually proves capability such as with CS or engineering, or medical school for now. With the rise of free education these credentials will go the way of the dinosaur and these institutions that rely on it aren't going to last unless they adapt to the new landscape, which I don't see how they can. Research institutions maybe?
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
More articles by same author on similar/same topic https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2023/08/17/a-levels-alternatives-to-university-apprenticeships-employe/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2023/08/17... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/03/british-higher-education-is-now-a-worthless-debt-trap/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/03/british-higher-e... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2022/08/21/university-waste-time-want-money-back/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2022/08/21... Author's background "Coming from a school where hairdressing and catering were offered as vocational courses alongside more traditional subjects, I can see the value and importance of offering a wide spectrum of qualifications as many people choose different career paths after compulsory education." https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/aug/24/schools.uk https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/aug/24/schools.uk
johnea 3y ago
Somebody needs to drive the garbage truck...
dahwolf 3y ago
If I have to believe several recent articles, there's an interesting gender imbalance as well. Whereas young women are making spectacular gains in higher education (in numbers, scores, degrees), young men are not going to college at all, do go but drop out or they under-perform in comparison. If you brush aside male-dominated studies like tech, the new baseline is 60-40 female/male. Not even that because some are already affirming men, without the correction it could easily be 70-30 and there's a case known of 80-20. In part this is due to old reasons (men going into trades) but also for new reasons (men preferring to benefit of a decent economy) as well as some men just staying home and playing video games. This growing female dominance has a lot of interesting side effects, many not particularly positive. Life on campus is different as it comes to dating/romance/sex. The men tend to not commit to anything as they are in a luxury position. Whilst surely a good time for the men, this destroys any hope of genuine intimacy and scars women for the rest of their lives into thinking that all men are trash. To men, female dominance is bad in the sense that there's a lack of male role models. They possibly had none at home, then again none in early education (90% female teachers and growing), and then very few in higher education. Recent cultural orthodoxy (excessive safetyism, "woke-ism", mob justice) is also a somewhat feminine invention that is unappealing to (some) men. Which leads to an ever-growing political gap between men and women.

75 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

With AI heavily driving into knowledge jobs and the insane value extraction / rent seeking that’s going on in education in the US, that is not a surprise at all. It’s smart.

Mistletoe 3y ago

The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.

77pt77 3y ago
Is that 35K for someone with a PhD?
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  A doctorate in lab technician? I highly doubt it.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  No a bachelors. Post docs with a PhD are expected to work for about 48k.
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    Wow! Thank you.

Racing0461 3y ago

That would be the correct assessment given the return of college vs the cost. Unless you want to be a doctor/lawyer/dentist/engineer, college isn't really worth it. and to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated.

Mistletoe 3y ago
80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living on campus at a public 4-year in-state institution is $26,027 per year or $104,108 over 4 years.
- reedf1 3y ago
  "...getting 10% returns like in the stock market..." You should start a fund!!
- rikketikm 3y ago
  No one has 80k laying around when he/she's 18, your calculation doesn't make any sense.
  - MrPatan 3y ago
    Then no one can pay for college anyway
    - hef19898 3y ago
      But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?
      - friend_and_foe 3y ago
        No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree, you wind up in a scenario where a nation wastes 4 years per generation only to wind up with the same economic landscape later. They'll cut these programs well before that happens. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

rikketikm 3y ago

How do you expect people to study humanities if you're making it inherently impossible?

kimi 3y ago
Should we expect people to study humanities? A lot of the best software is written by amateurs or hobbyists in their spare time. I'm sure there is plenty of experts on Greek tragedies just because they love it.
Almondsetat 3y ago
I don't understand why people confuse studying with getting a diploma. You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany
- CodinM 3y ago
  This is a green heron since the issue at hand isn't "oh but you can study without a diploma", the issue is "you won't be taken seriously because you don't have credentials" e.g. piece of paper.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    I mean, what credentials does a humanities graduate actually have? Who would need such knowledge in any job except for a humanities job itself?
    - theodric 3y ago
      Indeed, nobody takes us seriously regardless of what the paperwork says
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      The credential is that they were able to pass their classes, hopefully with good grades. Many employers want to know that you are the type of person who succeeds, not that you know some specific thing. University has basically taken the place of apprenticeships because employers don't want to train incompetent people, so they make you show competence with a degree.

dncornholio 3y ago

Wondering if social media is in part responsible. It seems you can make a lot of money as content creator, especially in NA. I don't understand or believe the COVID story.

romanovcode 3y ago
Survivorship bias. Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money. Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine. Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")
rightbyte 3y ago
No. You need like 100000+ "fans"/regulars to live of your YouTube channel. So if a person follows 5 creators, 5 in 100 000 can live of that. We are talking piano tuner rarity here.

bdamm 3y ago

Fundamentally, college is about building skills and networking with people. Leveraging AI should be taught in all college curriculum since it is a power multiplier for everyone. This idea that AI is making college irrelevant is completely absurd to me.

friend_and_foe 3y ago
You can build skills and network with people on your computer, for free.
- bdamm 3y ago
  There is no doubt that some people can succeed without the structure of a college institution, but many people do NOT. And not everyone knows the tricks for connecting with quality and knowledgeable people who are invested in your personal success. College provides a path for that. I don't think it says anything negative about people who choose to follow a college degree path. Rather, it speaks to the talent of people who succeed without it. There are many paths to a good and useful education. I personally went to a university and got a degree. And I know 100% that I would not have succeeded without it. That's my personal story; I've met plenty of people who succeed outside of that. Not everyone is the same or can take the same paths.
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    Well, from the current state of things, those people don't succeed with the institution either, which is why all the fuss. College is rather expensive for networking, rather time consuming and grueling if the education isn't the pitch. You say college is for the networking. That's not what the institutions are putting on the label.

skotobaza 3y ago

>"As a kid, you always imagine college will be a life-changing experience, and that your freshman year is where you'll get a chance to discover yourself" Well isn't that what happened exactly? He discovered that he wasn't really interested in studying computer science...

jamil7 3y ago

> Today, as most of his peers are starting their senior year of college, he's got more than $1 million in venture-capital funding. Is this meant to illustrate he's ahead in some way?

Kiro 3y ago
Is he not?

aetherspawn 3y ago

College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc. For the other unregulated fields its unsurprising considering that the quality of education was questionable compared with just reading half a dozen good books.

traceroute66 3y ago
> College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc. Agree wholeheartedly ! If you're going to college to "study" a mickey-mouse degree, then frankly you're wasting your time and your money. Mickey-mouse degrees can be readily taken care of through far more cost effective options: books, practical experience at home and apprenticeships/junior jobs. Employers are not stupid either. If you think a mickey-mouse degree is going to magically make you more employable then you're going to be in for a surprise.

mkl95 3y ago

As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.

blowski 3y ago
Online degrees seem to focus on teaching materials that are cheap to obtain elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to have seminars led by someone qualified, but I guess the numbers don’t add up for this.
- mkl95 3y ago
  This lines up with my experience. In my case, the teaching materials were some PDFs with the typical content recycled from old textbooks. The price tag was hefty, which made it feel like a scam.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I can't imagine what it is like doing a degree these days in say CS, when the wealth of information on Youtube is incredible, and you can self-pace and learn interesting stuff. Postgrad would still be a different story.
- komali2 3y ago
  I find youtube content to be very lowest common denominator and just a difficult form to learn from. There's open source comp sci curriculum that compile various MooCs and free college courses though that I thought was phenomenal: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    I agree that Youtube is very low quality (or non-existent) for most CS topics. I used Youtube (and other sources) often went I studied CS in college, but it was a constant search for the source that covered concepts relevant to what I was studying. Youtube has a plethora of videos on introductory CS concepts, things that would be covered in the first 2-3 courses. After that, it's still very much a desert.

fabian2k 3y ago

There should be pretty large differences per country here if the costs are the major driving factor. Universities can be much cheaper or even free in other countries compared to the US.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago

Lumping students of useless liberal arts "degrees" together with those on their way to becoming neurosurgeons, quants, investment bankers, lawyers or strategy consultants is a disgusting media default I can not comprehend. You CAN NOT lump those together for an average. Different planets. Different universes. Besides that: Aren‘t colleges as full as ever? Any college has trouble to fill a new semester?

tyroi34iooi 3y ago
Old school "liberal arts" before 1970 was about processing information, finding bias, finding patterns, critical thinking... Very meta... It would be excellent preparation for profession where you deal with people and information (investment banking). Liberal arts of current year has nothing to do with that.
- 77pt77 3y ago
  Little to no math though, which made it mostly a joke.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
West Virginia University has an enrollment crisis that lead to cutting a bunch of programs.

tyroi34iooi 3y ago

> They're not as interested in the typical "college experience" — whiling away four years rooming with friends and drinking at frat parties. They are, but college is not place to do that! People can not give a consent while drunk, at college you are definitely not getting away with it! > And many students are no longer drawn by the traditional mission of a liberal-arts education: to foster critical thinking and informed discourse. They are, but college is not place where liberal-arts education is! Last 4 years had shown that. Asking for evidence, or criticizing something, will get you in trouble at college!

dahart 3y ago

> Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not. In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn, which is a lot bigger than I thought before I looked it up. The Fed published the stats in an article a few years ago that was trying to suggest college was becoming not worth it, but once I looked at the raw data, it convinced me the other way. (This article has its own misleading comparisons by using ratios and ignoring absolutes, for example suggesting someone who saves 5x their salary is less well off than someone else who saves 6x their salary even when the 5x person has twice the income.) https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2019/10/15/is-college-still-worth-it-the-new-calculus-of-falling-returns.pdf https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...

erfgh 3y ago
Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.
- dahart 3y ago
  It’s not my statistic. It’s the Fed’s. They have a longer version of this report where they account for and try to calculate the causal value of college, which more or less does exactly what you’re suggesting. It’s in section III here: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college-worth-it/emmons_kent_ricketts_college_still_worth_it.pdf https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
- AussieWog93 3y ago
  >Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked. A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (who can own their own businesses and earn $250k+). Yet when we're looking for a career for our kids, we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.

pharos92 3y ago

It's a real shame that cost has significantly outweighed the value derived from high education. It's in the interest of business to continue to add value and explore new territory. Unfortunately though this has metastasized in higher education to producing junk degrees and programs that simply do not warrant costly or even sometimes formal training. High education has evolved from something accessible only by the elite, or the brightest (elevated on the dime of the elite) to an overpriced commodity that yields little returns. Especially in undergrad, is the cost really worth it to achieve a basic level of competency that employers then have to build on significantly after the fact? My advice to young people in my home country (not USA) is only go if the profession you want requires it. And I'll often help them to do a cost-benefit-analysis to work out if college is the right path.

taylorius 3y ago
The primary interests of business are primarily making money. When capitalism works at it's best, the innovation and exploring of new territory is the mechanism by which companies gain an edge in the market. Unfortunately there are other, less useful ways of gaining market advantage (monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture etc). It's a problem of corruption. To quote Bill Burr - "The president makes 400 grand a year. He's supposed to keep billionaires in line?"
- pharos92 3y ago
  Make money, yes. But it's hard (in a corruption free environment) to make money without providing a level of value.
  - taylorius 3y ago
    I'm sure that's true - and if I ever witness a corruption free environment, I shall verify! :-)

derelicta 3y ago

That's what happens when you keep telling a whole generation that it's their fault for having accumulated large amounts of debt, that they should have just chosen a "productive" degree and not something "useless" like Litterature or History. Gen Z is meant to be a productive generation, not an educated one. To hell with concepts such as upstanding citizens, as long as they are obedient at work :)

nottheengineer 3y ago

Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany. We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said this was very uncommon in their time, usually due to financial considerations. I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US. You get to pick once and if you pick wrong, it's worse than not going to college at all. Any other input on that? Mine is purely anecdotal and I didn't find any hard data to support or disprove my theory.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>The world is rapidly growing in complexity Only if you work in stuff like tech, but the world still needs many other jobs like plumbers, police officers, etc. who's jobs don't change that fast.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Even tech, software and hardware, unless you develop said tech, the use for said tech didn't really change fundamentally since social media came around. And that arguably only affected media and advertizing. What is posing problems now is the necessary transition from our old "system" (Western OEMs using Asian suppliers and burning fossil fuels, to oversimplify it) to something different (politically, socially, economically and technologically). Seems somewhere between 25 and just shy of 50 percent of any given population have serious problems accepting and adapting to that.
- com2kid 3y ago
  Have you seen modern plumbing? Solar heaters for water, grey water reclamation systems, hydronic heating, smart controllers for garden sprinklers. I've talked to quite a few very smart plumbers. The ones at the top of the field (earning good $) work with complex setups.
  - 3y ago

simonCGN 3y ago

Quite the US centred topic as university costs a fortune here.

CalRobert 3y ago
Opportunity cost is a factor everywhere, though.

unwind 3y ago

I really have nothing against the Netherlands, but here [1] is the same link to the "main" US site. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-not-going-to-college-tuition-costs-higher-education-2023-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-not-going-to-college-t...

yolkedgeek 3y ago

I'm almost finnishing my bachelors in software engineering. I really wish I didn't have to waste all these years in university. I could've learned much more by self study. the traditional teaching system which is centuries old, is very bad and backwards. we have advanced in every aspect, we are reaching new milestones everyday, but our education system hasn't changed much from the start of time. this is awful.

skotobaza 3y ago
Can you give an example? I studied software engineering in university and it wasn't ideal but it gave me the most important stuff: the learning system and almost complete overview of software and hardware development used in computer science jobs. Most people who do self-study only learn a very small subset of this knowledge - one or two programming languages and frameworks and maybe a little bit of algorithms.

javilovesmambo 3y ago

My perspective of university has also degraded with time. I do not think it only has to do with the generation but with the universities themselves. A bit of context: I undertook my 1st undergraduate program from 2007 to 2011, did an erasmus on 2010-2011, masters on 2013-2014 and Phd from 214 to 2017. When I started at 2007 (in Spain), there was a lot of freedom. No need to go to lesson (only certain labs were compulsory), most of the the courses will not have any compulsory hand in course works. For 95% of my courses was enough to sit for the exam and pass it. Exams were difficult, rarely less than 2h and always 'unseen' problems. Failing was an option and we all experience it. You could always enroll again and try the year after. Another thing I had rarely experience afterwards, lecturer will treat you as an adult. They will talk to you as an adult, give you the freedom and expect you to behave as one. All these freedoms allow us to learn about ourselves, do you really enjoy the topics? Do you need to spend 3h a week listening to the teacher or are you better off dealing with a different subject? Do you need 1 week to prepare for an exam or rather 9 months? Making failure an option helped maintaining a high standard on learning outcome. There was no need to lower the bar so everyone could pass. Also getting fees were nearly null and there were plenty of scholarships. The idea was something like everyone should have the opportunity to go to university, but only those who were ready could obtain a degree. Later on, as I explored universities in other countries I felt it was more like, you can pay us X$ for Y years and at the end you get a shiny diploma. Then as I shifted into software engineering, I found all the resources I needed were online. That together with the fact that universities tend to be slow to introduce new material and shift content, plus the high costs, plus the little freedom they provide, plus the focus they have on money, make universities loose appeal.

gosenx 3y ago

I don't know if anyone feels the same, but lately I have been regretting not have _enjoyed university_ because I wanted to rush to get a job. There is so much knowledge to acquire getting a degree that I kinda think that there is some agenda of making this generation dumber and dumber. One of the things that college does well, is to teach stuff that you don't think you need, but that are so important for you. Those that only do what their brain wants, optimize for what is more comfortable to them while university takes you out of your comfort zone. Are there things that can be improved, yes! Of course. But go to college and have some fun learning.

poisonborz 3y ago

In terms of education, they're right. Unis became a relic in terms of giving up to date knowledge compared to the ""open"" market. What they chase is headcount and research funds, entangled in medieval rulesets and personnel with lifelong tenure (either by law or politics) who have little incentive to change. Few fields remain where they are unavoidable, like law or medical studies. In terms of social life, experiences, my heart breaks for them to miss this. Merely just the setting of getting off the chains of parents, while still not having to (that much) worry about finances and and just visiting lectures that interest you gives you a whole different scope of thinking.

theodric 3y ago

Attending university was extremely valuable to me: I got to escape my parents, hang out with other people of compatible interests, experience broadband for the first time, and best of all, meet my wife. Oh, and employers sometimes filter on 'has degree' vs 'no degree' when selecting who to interview. It hasn't seemed to matter that my degree (music, specifically music performance) was completely irrelevant to my chosen line of work, and has contributed nothing to my career. I should've just skipped class.

friend_and_foe 3y ago
It's hard to gauge what point you're making. You supposedly paid for class, if you could've skipped class and gotten all the benefit you got from it, did college give you the benefit, or was it just getting out in the world and being around people your age?
- theodric 3y ago
  I'm saying that my life as I know it would be dramatically different, and probably worse, had I not gone to university, but all of the benefits I assign to having gone are peripheral (friends, spouse, weak employability marker) rather than direct (I learned something in class, related to my area of focus, that I was able to apply to my benefit in life). So it was worth going, but not because of The Great Education I Got There.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Young people are more attuned to where the wind is blowing, in part because they are part of the force that drives it, but generally because they're still learning how to navigate the world and don't have the privilege of not paying attention. You can get any book online for free. Any research paper. Any textbook. Any information you like that is known to more than a couple of people. You can even get almost all MIT coursework free, they give it to you. You. can get a full education watching videos and reading books online, for free. Illegal or no, if you are in it for the education and not for the credential you don't have to pay anyone for it anymore. As long as the internet exists this is a fact of life. Another fact of life is that only middling people get paid for credentials, the big bucks are earned by people that know what they're talking about and have some expertise. You need a credential to be mediocre, you need to excel at something to be excellent, and anybody that recognizes excellence doesn't need a piece of paper to confirm it. The rent seeking information brokers are all very mad about this of course. From news media to education to publishing, they're all clamoring something be done about it. But nothing can be done about it. They'll sell you the "college experience", the "need to stay informed", they'll guilt you, they'll try to scare you, but at best it buys them a little time. Nothing holds back the tide and their days are numbered as powerful institutions in our society.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
The education isn't the point of college though. Employers are more interested in the credentialism than the education for the vast majority of jobs. Even in software engineering which works hard to avoid credentialism via leetcode and the like it's quite important. It's difficult to even get an interview at many(most?) firms without the degree.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Yeah, and part of what I'm saying is, if credential is more important for a job that capability then it's inefficient additional overhead, unless credential actually proves capability such as with CS or engineering, or medical school for now. With the rise of free education these credentials will go the way of the dinosaur and these institutions that rely on it aren't going to last unless they adapt to the new landscape, which I don't see how they can. Research institutions maybe?

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

More articles by same author on similar/same topic https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2023/08/17/a-levels-alternatives-to-university-apprenticeships-employe/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2023/08/17... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/03/british-higher-education-is-now-a-worthless-debt-trap/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/03/british-higher-e... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2022/08/21/university-waste-time-want-money-back/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/2022/08/21... Author's background "Coming from a school where hairdressing and catering were offered as vocational courses alongside more traditional subjects, I can see the value and importance of offering a wide spectrum of qualifications as many people choose different career paths after compulsory education." https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/aug/24/schools.uk https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/aug/24/schools.uk

johnea 3y ago

Somebody needs to drive the garbage truck...

dahwolf 3y ago

If I have to believe several recent articles, there's an interesting gender imbalance as well. Whereas young women are making spectacular gains in higher education (in numbers, scores, degrees), young men are not going to college at all, do go but drop out or they under-perform in comparison. If you brush aside male-dominated studies like tech, the new baseline is 60-40 female/male. Not even that because some are already affirming men, without the correction it could easily be 70-30 and there's a case known of 80-20. In part this is due to old reasons (men going into trades) but also for new reasons (men preferring to benefit of a decent economy) as well as some men just staying home and playing video games. This growing female dominance has a lot of interesting side effects, many not particularly positive. Life on campus is different as it comes to dating/romance/sex. The men tend to not commit to anything as they are in a luxury position. Whilst surely a good time for the men, this destroys any hope of genuine intimacy and scars women for the rest of their lives into thinking that all men are trash. To men, female dominance is bad in the sense that there's a lack of male role models. They possibly had none at home, then again none in early education (90% female teachers and growing), and then very few in higher education. Recent cultural orthodoxy (excessive safetyism, "woke-ism", mob justice) is also a somewhat feminine invention that is unappealing to (some) men. Which leads to an ever-growing political gap between men and women.