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In absolute numbers, college is still 100% a good deal, provided you have some kind of scholarship or go to an in-state institution. The problem is that some of

• anovikov 3y ago
  Well, that is a problem with government and banks, not the universities. I think liberal arts degree is a good thing if you are already set for life. Getting it on credit and expecting to repay that credit with job is of course, crazy.
  • sickofparadox 3y ago
    Well, I'd say that while it might be a problem to be solved by governments and banks, it certainly ends up being egg on the Universities' faces. Anecdotally, almost all of my college friends and acquaintances held the university just as responsible for charging the prices it did, thus requiring them to go into further debt. (It was a technical school and most of my social group had jobs-focused degrees)
• Almondsetat 3y ago
  Ivy League schools are so good at marketing that they have brainwashed the youth into thinking community colleges are worthless. Spoiler: all bachelors are foundational, meaning they are taught basically the same not only in the US but around the world and don’t require any fancy equipment or laboratory to complete
  • lotsofpulp 3y ago
    90% of students are not aiming to go to a top school, and of those that do, they know the benefit is networking with peers at the top schools, not the labs or fancy equipment.
    • boringg 3y ago
      Except, you know, the top tier research labs with the most talented minds working in them. That absolutely has value. Is it worth the money that you are paying for your diploma - I don't know. The denigration of our best technical programs to say they don't have that much value above and beyond networking benefits really undermines some of the core values of our educational institutions.
      • lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Sorry, I was only referring to bachelor level education.
        • boringg 3y ago
          You still need quality labs to run experiments for engineering and science programs at a bachelor level education.
        • kelipso 3y ago
          If not most, a significant number of grad students did undergrad research.
  • kelipso 3y ago
    > Spoiler: all bachelors are foundational, meaning they are taught basically the same That is just really really not true. Variance in quality of professors is huge. Also they clearly don't all follow the same textbooks or course syllabus.
    • Almondsetat 3y ago
      basically is not exactly exactly
    • BeetleB 3y ago
      > Variance in quality of professors is huge. But are relatively independent of rank of institution (some would say inversely correlated). I went to a mediocre state school (definitely not in top 100), and a top 3 grad school. By and large, the mediocre school's professors cared more about teaching and put more effort into it.
      • jackcosgrove 3y ago
        This is well known in education, that level of instruction is inversely correlated with time spent on pedagogy, and positively correlated with time spent on content. In other words, kindergarten teachers think a lot about how to teach, while professors think about what to teach. The quality of instruction would probably be worse at a research university than at a college focused mainly on undergraduate education.
    • anjel 3y ago
      It's totally true about law schools
  • User23 3y ago
    Having taken some community college courses and also having audited at an Ivy, the latter really do have superior professors. Whether that improvement is worth it is another question. Oh, and the community college professors were entirely competent.
    • Almondsetat 3y ago
      I’ll take a good linear algebra professor over an excellent linear algebra professor and crippling debts
      • sarchertech 3y ago
        Ivy League isn’t going to leave you with crippling debt. The majority of students don’t pay anywhere close to the sticker price, and the network you build is worth the cost of admission. It’s the lesser known private schools where you can rack up massive debt in private loans that don’t have income based repayment plans. That’s when you get into trouble.
        • clusterhacks 3y ago
          At Harvard, 28% of students receive no aid at all. So they pay full sticker price. Average net price by income in 2021-2022 [1]: Income Cost 0-$30,000 -- $5900 $30,001-$48,000 -- $3,002 $48,001-$75,000 -- $4,180 $75,001-$110,000 -- $17,037 $110,001+ -- $52,634 If your household makes $110,000 per year in California, the take home pay I found calculated online was ~$75,000. So that means paying around 22% of take home pay to go to Harvard? Can the average household actually put 22% of their take home pay into tuition without taking on debt? [1] https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=harvard&s=all&id=166027#netprc https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=harvard&s=all&id=166...
          • sarchertech 3y ago
            I said the majority not all, and I didn’t say no debt. And $52k is the average paid by all students with a family income of above $110k. Not the price paid by every student once you hit $110k. This average is skewed by people making much more than that. For specific numbers, if your parents make $150k, they are expected to contribute 10% of their income. You can look up the numbers here https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat... For a family with an income of $150k and one student in college, they are expected to pay $15k per year. If they were instead making $110k, they are expected to pay $5k per year. If they make $85k or less, they are expected to pay nothing. Harvard also looks at assets but excludes primary residence and retirement savings. So yes the vast majority of people can afford to attend harvard with almost no debt. Even in the rare situation where you take on large amounts of debt, the connections made there and the brand recognition of the degree are almost definitely worth it from a financial perspective.
  • lupusreal 3y ago
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  • JCM9 3y ago
    For the hard sciences things lab lab equipment can matter even for undergrad. The ironic thing here is that in the US large public universities often have far better labs and equipment that the Ivies. A few are decent at science but many others very much not so. I’d take a Chemistry undergrad from a UC Berkeley, UCLA, or Penn State over one from Brown or Dartmouth all day long. You’d literally be paying a ton more for an objectively less good degree.
    • dixie_land 3y ago
      My understanding is that the Ivies are traditionally known for their business and law schools. For that matter, you go to Ivies for the connections, not the education per se.
  • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > they have brainwashed the youth into thinking they brainwashed parents of the youth, they hold the purse strings
    • pauldenton 3y ago
      Actually it's the Federal Government who is ultimately backing these student loans, and it is the Federal Government that made student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The best way to deal with it would put colleges on the hook for it. If a student declares bankruptcy their student debt is gone, and the college using their massive endowments can eat it.
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment.
  • BeetleB 3y ago
    > and don’t require any fancy equipment or laboratory to complete Not everyone gets a CS or math degree. For things like ME/EE/Civil Eng, equipment absolutely matters. And they aren't cheap.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • blagie 3y ago
    Super-spoiler: This is absolutely, completely incorrect. 1) Teaching quality doesn't correlate much with quality (if anything, the inverse), so an Ivy is likely to have similar or worse teaching than a community college. 2) There is a HUGE difference in a community college bachelor degree and a proper university. Look at the curriculum. Much of what's covered in community college, Ivy students will have done in high school, and a community college will have (quite literally) NO advanced courses, equivalent to what university juniors and seniors might take. If you want identical, you can compare elite schools to large state universities (University of Texas, University of California, ASU, etc.). At that point, classes are more-or-less identical to elite schools. Major remaining difference is brand stamp and network (which, coming from an elite school, I can say matter a lot). However, community colleges serve a different purpose, and do not try to accomplish the same thing. They give a leg up into basic professional work. If you work at McD's or the local supermarket, and want a living income as a nurse, IT technician, AV work, or similar, community colleges will do a very good job for not a lot of money and with experience about being practical for people with the kinds of real-world constraints that come with e.g. minimum wage labor. You will NOT be on a path to a job as a doctor, engineer, or similar. However, a community college education can allow you the basic standard of living to provide that kind of socioeconomic mobility to your kids.
    • vel0city 3y ago
      Coursework at community colleges often transfers to the basic classes at a state university at a fraction of the cost. A 12-hour undergrad semester at the state school near me is ~$8,200 in tuition alone not including a few hundred dollars in fees and a few hundred dollars in books. 12 hours at the community college nearby is $744 including books, tuition, and fees. The majority of the first three semesters in an engineering degree from the state school will be mostly transferrable classes available at the community college, the fourth semester will be pretty mixed between major related classes that can't be transferred and transferrable classes. Starting classes at community college and transferring to the state university later is a good strategy but is often ignored.
      • blagie 3y ago
  • ohdannyboy 3y ago
    I have to disagree. I did both community college and a top ranked tech school for undergrad. I also know someone who attended some CS classes at this school but went on to get a CS degree from a mid ranked school (he was a chem engineering major first). The difference between the CS classes at the community college and the high ranked university were night and day. If you try at a CC you'll get an A and you really have to fuck up to fail. Those classes were basically lectures, reading and tests. The curriculum at the top ranked school was far far more robust and As were hard earned. The labs, office hours and other learning I did with other people was vital. The difference between the mid and top ranked program was mostly students. My friend said the curriculum was similar but the curves were different so the expectations were lower. Fair or not, connections also matter. Interning for Intel was a big deal for future prospects and being at a top university put me in a better position for that. Ivy league isn't dominant in tech but they are in plenty of other fields like law.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• fasthands9 3y ago
  I do feel where there was a weird transition where small liberal arts schools used to just be for rich people - but then they became for all people (it just meant debt for the non-rich ones) I come from a highly educated but not super wealthy family. Even 15 years ago, my family told me unless I got into an Ivy or similar school I should just go to my state university. I feel like that, as the starting point for conventional wisdom, would help more people.
  • fullshark 3y ago
    First two years in community college, transfer to state university is by far the best return on investment. In part because some kids after two years of college decide it's not for them.
    • rawgabbit 3y ago
      I have a son in a state university now. Unfortunately, things are so competitive even in a state school; I don't believe the community college pipeline is viable. Yes, technically you can go to a CC and try to transfer to a state university. The odds of that happening, is however very difficult. At my son's large state university, it is almost impossible to transfer majors now. The reason being is that there are so many students and applicants wanting to go into the popular majors. The queue does not move. If you are in, you are in. If you are not, you need a miracle to get into a popular major like CS, engineering, biomedical etc.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        If you can't make it into a state school of choice after high school, going to a CC, getting good grades in those classes, might give them a second chance to get in. For a state school, and this is hardly guaranteed. One trick is to see if they have quotas based on geography in the state. So you want to get into UW in Seattle, it might make sense moving to Spokane, attending Spokane Community College for a year, and then re-apply to UW as an Eastern Washingtonian! It might work, who knows. Doesn't apply to really top schools. You aren't going to transfer into MIT, Stanford, Caltech from a CC, or probably any other university.
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  >small elite liberal arts colleges If they are elite, they should pay for themselves. They are not actually elite. Everyone wants to feel elite, so everyone pretends to have some prestige even if the school is mid/low. Most of the issue is that unrestricted credit line.
  • sarchertech 3y ago
    Federal loans aren’t unrestricted. The problem is that private banks are willing to loan large amounts because you can’t bankrupt out of student loans (in most cases).
• bo1024 3y ago
  You seem to be basing the value of education solely on employability, but that misses a huge amount of the value of a liberal arts education -- not just to the individual, but even more so to society at large.
  • sickofparadox 3y ago
    That's a really nice sentiment and I used to believe it, but going to college has disabused me of this boomer/gen x lie.
    • red-iron-pine 3y ago
      i don't think it's a lie, per se. but at 50k a year? absolutely not worth it. and if it's so great for society, why isn't society willing to pay for it?
      • azemetre 3y ago
        I mean wouldn’t the better question to ask if it is even good for society? American population is more educated than ever but we still have massive issues of wealth inequality and people still fall for disinformation all the time. At what percentage do we need for population with degrees to finally tackle the hard problems of our society?
• StableAlkyne 3y ago
  The universal credit line was created a few decades ago when Congress decided to make student loan debt very hard to discharge (you basically can only get out of it by dying, becoming so disabled you cannot hold a job, or leaving the country). This encouraged lenders to put money into what is effectively a risk free investment. Suddenly, everyone had infinite money, and there was no pressure to keep university costs low (as most states don't have the political will to cap their public education costs in a meaningful way). Colleges started investing more into attractions for their students - fancy gyms, rec halls, new dorms, etc. Both combined to "require" that schools raise the price. And on the other side, now that everyone could afford college, public schools started to heavily encourage everyone to go to college - degree holders make more on average after all. Which is how people go into college for degrees they have no practical use for (picking on philosophy, it is great and gives a very valuable set of critical thinking skills, but do you really need those skills if you're not going to be an author, professor, lawyer, etc?). It also led to lots of folks going into college as "undecided" majors, paying tens of thousands per semester without any plan.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > It also led to lots of folks going into college as "undecided" majors, paying tens of thousands per semester without any plan. A lot of universities won't let you select a major until you are toward the end of your sophomore year. Many majors have pre-requisites that you have to satisfy, and acceptance isn't guaranteed (even if you are already accepted to the university).
    • StableAlkyne 3y ago
      That sounds like a terrible deal - why would someone pay thousands of dollars for the chance to maybe buy the service you wanted in the first place? It only makes sense if it's a prestigious university whose name guarantees you a job or PhD slot somewhere What portion of universities are doing that?
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
• fundad 3y ago
  Forgive my quip but college is the absolute worst way to improve your job prospects except for all the other ways. I get that if politics is important to you, you won't like a place that includes your political opponents. So some people don't let their kids go, or they resent that their kids have to mix with political opponents. Though as pointed our here already, most kids are not politically inclined and are trying to have fun.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  None of what you just wrote has anything to do with the students themselves; and that's the problem. College was 90% a waste of time and effort for my ADHD self. The overwhelming majority of value-to-be-had is gated behind the bureaucracy and traditionalism of the system itself. The only value I ever found at college was to casually be around people who are in the mindset of learning. That value was minimized by the tedious and time-consuming work that school is designed from the ground up to be.