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Americans' confidence in higher education has taken a nosedive

123 points by pseudolus 2y ago

colechristensen 2y ago
Rightly so. University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not. They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential. I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.
- meroes 2y ago
  Well since the 1970s the official policy by the US govt is the STEM pipeline is for making more STEM workers. Broad perspective is basically 50 years by the wayside. It’s completely intended and unsurprising you know few with liberal independence.
  - dantheman 2y ago
    Only 18% of degrees are in STEM https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_reg.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_reg.as...
- derbOac 2y ago
  The other side of the equation is mindless algorithmic HR hiring practices though, where a college degree is treated much the same as a vendor training certificate. The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply. I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  When employers just want to see the credential, then students will just do what it takes to get the credential. And so many employers (needlessly IMO) use the credential to gatekeep access to professional jobs. Employers have turned universities into shams where you pay $100K, wait four years, and pop out with a paper that says "I can be employed."
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  i use to play with the idea to provide books, a bed, laundry and food for free. Periodic tests serve only to throw you out. Nothing fancy, a basic meal. If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  You get what you measure for and well, good luck measuring abstracts like 'a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life'. Especially when you never ask what their ambitions in life were, or if they are anything remotely achievable or assisted by college. In that light is it any surprise that instead of getting the mother-and-apple-pie you get certificate mills?
p1esk 2y ago
And yet acceptance rates at top schools have been consistently going down.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  I would be willing to bet that applications per student are way up on a long term timescale. It’s the same thing as the job application problem. When it is as easy as having a form autofilled and hitting submit (even if there is a moderate fee), you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
- geodel 2y ago
  It is like saying people are eating less at restaurants in last few years yet Michelin star restaurants have 3 months waitlist. Obviously top rated stuff has high demand and low supply. Further if students are finding lower rank universities less worth the money, many of them would try even harder to get in higher ranked ones.
  - p1esk 2y ago
    Is confidence in good schools rising?
    - geodel 2y ago
      Your comment above indicate that.
      - p1esk 2y ago
        Not necessarily. As others said, could be caused by increasing number of applications per applicant, or foreign students. Or maybe increasingly important reasons to graduate from top school that have nothing to do with actual education. If in 5 years AI can do most jobs better than humans, how can a middle class young adult advance up the social ladder?
- guccigav 2y ago
  Also, the college prep and tutoring industry has been ballooning in the US. Historically, Chinese companies dominated this market in terms of consumer base, but we'll probably see a continuation of this trend in the US too as universities become more selective and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where the more selective you become more students/parents will consider you as more "elite".
tootie 2y ago
It seems all the concerns boil down to economics. I don't think people did nearly as much cost-benefit analysis in the past. The fact that college was affordable meant you were freer to experiment and enjoy yourself. Now that the price is so high, it entails pressure to get your money's worth. Thus creating a vicious cycle.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I'm not so sure it's a cycle. Ultimately, employers' requiring a college degree for more and more jobs is what drives the increasing demand, and the increasing demand results in increasing prices. And employers require a college degree because they need some kind of coarse selection screen, and don't seem to have any other way to distinguish capable applicants from incapable ones.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    should increasing demand increase prices?
- guccigav 2y ago
  The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market, where government regulation suppresses the supply of accredited universities. I think we're seeing some change with the latter supply (e.g. community college, online degrees, etc) but demand for a U.S. college degree still stands strong on the global market from international students. It would be nice to get data on yearly university applications and do an empirical analysis on supply and demand.
  - claytongulick 2y ago
    > The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market I think you're missing a big factor, rising admin spend [1]. [1] https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
guccigav 2y ago
The author should also mention the increase in competition in the labor market and the lack of labor protection laws to prevent outsourcing. Statistically speaking, a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. A lot of the negative sentiments I conjecture come from the higher standards across the board and the ubiquity of a bachelor's degree in the labor market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory
- randomdata 2y ago
  > a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree. Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
  - guccigav 2y ago
    > A person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree. Real income to GDP ratio has been stagnant by some degrees but in this case, we're only looking at average IQ on a normal distribution, average as in 85-115 (or whatever the official range is), assuming that's what you mean by 'spectrum'. e.g. for the average {IQ} or whatever metric you meant in a person, he/she will earn more compared to the same person ceteris paribus, but without a university education.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      Humans are way more complicated than IQ. Someone with a high IQ but little ambition is not going to go far in college nor are they going to go far in the economy. People over time is the only reasonably reliable measure we have. And the data is clear: Statistically, people did not start earning more when they started attaining college degrees.
jamesliudotcc 2y ago
> According to a new Gallup poll, Americans are losing the thread with higher education. Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls. This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable? It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down: > 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse. Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring. Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not? It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  I was going to object to the phrase "losing the thread", as if we are getting confused by an overly complex plot explication. The article is merely self-referential.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  You shouldn't even need a college degree to proofread mainstream news, which is written at, what, a 5th or 6th grade reading level? K-12 Schools also share the blame for not even remotely educating their students.
  - jamesliudotcc 2y ago
    No, of course not, but credentialism.
- everybodyknows 2y ago
  There's no budget for proofreaders, it's a shoestring org: https://lithub.com/about-literary-hub/ https://lithub.com/about-literary-hub/
cardamomo 2y ago
Am I missing something here? The figures quoted in the opening paragraph suggest to me that confidence is rising. > Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat... - linked in the first sentence. The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
- amalcon 2y ago
  Looks like there is a "some" option. For some reason the author quotes one number from one year, a second from the other, and ignores the third option in both. Ignore "not sure" respondents in polls at your own peril.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    The some (there were actually 5 options) line is almost flat: 33, 34, 40, 32. It peaked and then settled back to about 1/3rd of respondents.
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  It is confusing because the author was really messy with her use of the figures to where that sentence reads nonsensically. The actual Gallup news article that is cited by the article posted is much clearer. The posted article reads as if it was just a re-arranged/scrambled word salad of the original article to the point where some parts no longer make sense. The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat...
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simpaticoder 2y ago
This short article is one person's take on a recent Gallop poll. Here is a direct link to the poll itself: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat... The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1] The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility. 1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
- throwaway42668 2y ago
  I wouldn't even know how to answer the question as presented in the poll. Confidence in higher education to do what?
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Yeah, until it materializes in lower rates of people actually going to college people at minimum folks seem pretty confident that it has a return on investment. Also I'm honestly not sure I really care/put any weight into the opinions of random adults whose opinions of higher education are basically a reflection of how universities are portrayed to them in their news bubble. The fact that political affiliation not only matters but matters a great deal means it has little to do with the institutions themselves. I bet you could get the same results with "confidence in science" which is just as vague and nonsensical.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      It has been materializing in fewer people going to college in fact.
vt85 2y ago
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BrandonMarc 2y ago
When former students need the federal government to bail them out of their debt, it's clear the value of higher ed has plummeted.
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  It's incredible that they're bailing out loans but not stopping anybody from going down the exact same path. Who exactly wins here?
  - Dig1t 2y ago
    I guess the political party who is doling out the money? They get more votes because they get to be the saviors. Not sure, but it does seem like a way to make people reliant on your political party.
  - BrandonMarc 2y ago
    The universities and loan compaines win. Who loses? The chump who gets left holding the bag ... taxpayers. As usual.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    When tuition was $1000 (which it used to be in 1970) no one was talking about how getting an English degree could be a catastrophic financial decision. At worst it was a waste of time. Instead of funding universities and managing them like we should be, we handed them over to MBAs who seem to charge more and more every year for the same degree. Obviously federally-guaranteed loans are an idiotic solution to a self-inflicted problem.
Aleksdev 2y ago
A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back. The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills. I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.
- standardUser 2y ago
  It depends on the size and terms of the loans. I still pay about $75/mo at 3.8% for my loans (20 year later). Going away to college was far, far, far more valuable to me (in terms of fun, adventure, etc) than the cost of that monthly bill.
  - betaby 2y ago
    Is that a typical rate? Youtube showed me scary cases of 9%.
    - standardUser 2y ago
      No it is not! I was appalled years later to learn that government-backed loans were being given at such high rates. It just seems cruel. The government has no obligation to turn a profit on student debt.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        If you're in the US, the government isn't really profiting on school debt. The government guarantees the debt, but that is a play to protect the banks rather than to drum up profits. Profits really don't matter to a government that can print any money it needs but doesn't currently have.
      - verdverm 2y ago
profsummergig 2y ago
Higher-Ed will become like real oak/maple wood flooring (vs. composite/manufactured). Those who can't afford it won't indulge. Those who can, will, because IYKYK.
mikewarot 2y ago
Long ago, I was told that it was only worth paying for College if you were going to be an Professional Engineer or a Nurse. It seems that advice has held true. I've never pushed my child towards College.
- Aleksdev 2y ago
  And a real engineer. Not just some basic things where you can just get a certification. Like I tell people, I don’t think you need 4 years to learn basic things like html, css and some JavaScript.
  - mikewarot 2y ago
    The HN crowd seems to be quite willing to hand out the title "Engineer" to programmers, and quite touchy about it as well. I meant Professional STATE LICENSED Engineer. Anyone can be a programmer (aka "engineer"), and some are even good at it. ;-)
    - amonith 2y ago
      Fun fact from Poland: Here a real "Professional State Licensed Engineer" degree (anything outside IT) is absolutely NOT worth it because the market for most jobs is local. Only Software "Enginneering" (with or without degree, doesn't matter) is. I do have a masters degree in computer science (software engineering specialization) and since I'm working as a contractor from the start nobody ever saw it or wanted to see it.
eimrine 2y ago
Maybe ed industry has become too regulated to have a chance to be useful? There are a lot of things even a private school can't teach children, for example: government's taxes is just an aggression, proprietary software is evil even if this is "required" by some teacher or institution, history lessons is just propaganda, god is an undefined value etc.
LoganDark 2y ago
I personally lack confidence in higher education because I'm neurodivergent, and high school pushed a method of learning that is not compatible with the way in which my brain works. They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate - it is the source of the "how will this ever be useful later in life?" that is oft-cited of students. I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out. I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself. I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  I think most people learn the same way you describe. But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work. I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
  - hilbert42 2y ago
    "But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work." ...And many go on to become teachers and textbook writers thus perpetuating the problem for students who absorb information differently to the way they do. We need multiple approaches to teaching, unfortunately they're not seen as conducive with efficiency, minimizing syllabus material, keeping teachers' numbers to a minimum, etc. (See my comment to the same post.)
declan_roberts 2y ago
I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree. I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off. It's cruel and immoral and must change.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  You only end up 100k in the hole if you eschew your perfectly good public in state option. That's part of the reason. Public colleges recruiting at high schools out of state are straight up doing it in bad faith.
- tzs 2y ago
  > I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off. That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid. Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that. Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1]. I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years. They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived). [1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student-debt https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...
Barrin92 2y ago
>This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls. This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media. There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2] I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines. [1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 [2]https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-a015-4647-8e07-b60749492be1/jdp-econ-party-aug.png?v=5710b2ed1cee1bdfd30cb9c02455b43d https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-...
EGreg 2y ago
Why teach kids stuff that will be obsolete by the time they come of age to work? AI is going to do to most subjects what calculators did to arithmetic, and desktop publishing did to cursive writing. Is anyone learning their times tables and calligraphy today for everyday use? Sadly, star trek had it right — once you’re hooked up to the borg hive mind with neuralink, it’s not even clear what any individual has to add to “the collective”. Change my mind! Or in 30 years: “Change our mind”
rr808 2y ago
My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college. I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things. I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised. System seems screwed up.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college Top 10 colleges are a completely different game. Nobody needs to go to a top 10 university. It’s a game for the most competitive to play. It’s not equivalent to higher education in general.
  - kredd 2y ago
    Outside of global top 50, ROI decreases to the point where you start considering where it is actually worth it. That was at least my thought process back in the days when I was applying to universities.
    - newzisforsukas 2y ago
      Care to quantify this?
    - elric 2y ago
      Where I'm from, a 4 year stint in higher education is about as expensive as a month's wages. It gets more expensive if you need student housing, but many students can and do commute. Most young folks can study something that interests them, at little risk. No one here has to worry about the ROI of their offspring's studies, nor do they have to worry about their prepubescent child starting charities (or whatever other insane nonsense) in order to qualify for some insanely expensive elitist college. Seems like a much more sensible approach than putting a fuckton of pressure on kids in order to get them in a college which will land them with 30 years of debt on top of a potential degree. Let kids be kids, and give students a chance to learn and explore.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Higher education is not a great filter anymore. Everyone goes to college - and most students simply don’t have the fundamental intelligence for it to mean much. Colleges have also changed - there are large numbers of activist degrees that seem to not really be serious fields. People get degrees in such fields that aren’t economically valuable and then struggle in the job market. If you’re studying something that personally interests you but isn’t useful to others (as the job market suggests), aren’t you just doing a hobby? And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.
- deleted 2y ago
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_the_inflator 2y ago
Higher education is personally very challenging and not how people were designed. Even those with some standard deviation above the mean aren't meant to study books all day. This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps. It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning). In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting. When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional. Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.
janalsncm 2y ago
What’s clear to me is that our feeling about University is a bit like the Anna Karenina quote: Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In other words, a lot of people are unhappy with college, but everyone has their own ax to grind about why. I will say that I have never experienced any ideological purity tests that conservatives are constantly complaining about. Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.
- eimrine 2y ago
  So you have happened to finish the grade in US without publicly saying the following words even once - "all races are equal"? It sounds too unbelivable.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Yeah we never had to read Karl Marx either.
    - eimrine 2y ago
      That is not "either", you just got to have another sort of propaganda.
  - kenjackson 2y ago
    Nope. But I did have to do the pledge of allegiance every day until high school.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    That's what you find objectionable?
    - eimrine 2y ago
      Making a zombie from a human is very objectionable for me even if the content of perpetrator's speaking is legit. If your learning environment suffers from a censourship too much to have an ability to say "I don't want to live with Muslim family in one neibourhood" in school so why the big bro insists the students to say something about race situation? The school got to teach but it also loves to shape.
Narhem 2y ago
Not surprised as most majors don't leaf to valuable jobs and higher education turn from an attempt to help the younger generation to business.
WhatsTheBigIdea 2y ago
What does "confidence" mean exactly? Regardless, I'm sure that the students actually in college are there for "all the right reasons."
richardanaya 2y ago
AI will challenge the reasons we go to college even more.
iftheshoefitss 2y ago
Higher ed was the driving force for a lot of the protests etc was bound to be “punished” for lack of a better word same with Hollywood the devil works hard but farm boys work even harder
satisfice 2y ago
When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match. The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead. I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate. I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision. I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
hilbert42 2y ago
I have acquired both trade and university/academic skills but most of my career has involved the latter. When employing my trade-learnt skills I apply myself in a quite different manner to that when I'm working in my more formalized profession, and in some ways I've found that way of working more enjoyable. Achieving or creating things with one's hands can be most satisfying. About 40 years ago trade-based skills such as woodworking, metalwork, tooling, crafts, etc. that employed a large percentage of the workforce fell out of favor and that a career that required a college/university education was seen to be more financially rewarding. This resulted in a huge increase in the numbers who attended college/university. Leaving aside politics, I think it's time to reappraise our educational needs, and we should stop looking down upon jobs that involve manual work/dexterity as we've done in the recent past. Moreover, we shouldn't forget that until the age of high tech and automation most work was of a manual dexterous nature and productively therefrom provided most of our needs. Not all but much of that is still relevant. I know what I'm saying flies in the face of modern automation, computerization and smart working, etc. And I acknowledge that my view is counterintuitive given current trends in today's world. Nevertheless, from what I've observed, many, many people don't want or have need to know the intricate workings of advanced engineering and technology, or unfathomable facts about the physical world such as why α is ≈1/137. I'd thus suggest that in many instances a university education has not necessarily been the best fit or outcome for many people. Perhaps it's only now that many are beginning to realize the benefits of acquiring an advanced education are just not worth the time and effort not to mention its inordinately high cost. And to some extent we now may be seeing a reversal of the problem we had before the current trend of seeing a college education as a necessity—that's where many who were suited to a college education were unable to receive one through lack of finances and such. Little doubt the picture is more complex than I've painted it. Irrespective, I'm not for a moment arguing or agreeing that we should dumb down education in any way. In fact I'd argue the opposite, which is that we need to better educate and train people in ways that most suit both their abilities and personal traits/personalities so they lead more fruitful lives. Furthermore, I'd argue that as a society we need a better understanding of both the educational needs of individuals and those required by society for it to function properly, and that this is urgent because of major changes and developments in manufacturing, with the impact of AI and other significant changes within society. These changes are already having a profound impact on what people do and how they go about doing it. It's all the more urgent we address these issues now because change is occurring with ever-increasing rapidity. I'll finish by saying that for the benefit of both those who are being educated and of society generally we must dispel the somewhat elitist notion that's often seen in academia and by many employers that those who work in the trades are doing low and menial work and that they are so employed because they are either incapable of more advanced academic work or are otherwise unsuited for it. Such notions aren't helpful for many reasons but the most obvious one is that they skew the numbers of those who go into trades and professions and the impact of this skewing is negative. Also, it's important to stress that many trades require considerable training as well as the development of excellent skills together with lots of experience, especially so if they are to be performed well. Essentially, much work that's now deemed as trades-based is far from being menial. Next, some of the smartest people I know work in the trades and I'd put them up against many who've more formal qualifications. Also, from my observation, many of the people who I've encountered who are happiest and live the most contented lives are trades people.
Eumenes 2y ago
I like to refer to higher education as legacy education. As someone who skipped college and jumped right into the workforce after the dot com boom, I was renting an apartment/paying my own bills/managing my own affairs by the time I was 21. I had to figure everything out on my own. I was making 60k/year in a big city maintaining websites and helping the small media company I worked at with IT problems. My comp is in the high 200s/low 300s these days. No formal education. When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character. I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.
- big-green-man 2y ago
  I think youre 100% right. Taking it further, it's legacy education because there are no effective gatekeepers to information anymore. You can learn anything you want now for free. If the goal is to learn how to do something you want to do, universities aren't worth the expense. They gatekeep credentials now, not education. I personally do not think that status quo can continue for very long. I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Ok, but you do realize that living on 60k in a large city is not particularly easy these days? You'll be putting down half your salary to rent, at the minimum. Same applies to the other jobs: sure, you build character. But you're also perpetually one car accident away from financial ruin.
BigParm 2y ago
Educated competent people being paid dogshit is becoming more common.
egberts1 2y ago
That moment the higher education took a HUGE swandive into the empty cement pond, is when their admission no longer relies on SAT/ACT. Soon, LSAT and others to follow. It is like the state no longer demanding an occupational license, leaving consumers rudderless in getting quality workman. I for one will only be checkibg for medical degrees that have SAT and MCAT admission in force policy. This act only disservice those hardworking and legitimate grads. https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-dont-require-the-mcat-what-you-should-know https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-d...

123 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Rightly so. University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not. They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential. I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.

meroes 2y ago
Well since the 1970s the official policy by the US govt is the STEM pipeline is for making more STEM workers. Broad perspective is basically 50 years by the wayside. It’s completely intended and unsurprising you know few with liberal independence.
- dantheman 2y ago
  Only 18% of degrees are in STEM https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_reg.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_reg.as...
derbOac 2y ago
The other side of the equation is mindless algorithmic HR hiring practices though, where a college degree is treated much the same as a vendor training certificate. The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply. I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
ryandrake 2y ago
When employers just want to see the credential, then students will just do what it takes to get the credential. And so many employers (needlessly IMO) use the credential to gatekeep access to professional jobs. Employers have turned universities into shams where you pay $100K, wait four years, and pop out with a paper that says "I can be employed."
throwaway14356 2y ago
i use to play with the idea to provide books, a bed, laundry and food for free. Periodic tests serve only to throw you out. Nothing fancy, a basic meal. If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
Nasrudith 2y ago
You get what you measure for and well, good luck measuring abstracts like 'a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life'. Especially when you never ask what their ambitions in life were, or if they are anything remotely achievable or assisted by college. In that light is it any surprise that instead of getting the mother-and-apple-pie you get certificate mills?

p1esk 2y ago

And yet acceptance rates at top schools have been consistently going down.

dghlsakjg 2y ago
I would be willing to bet that applications per student are way up on a long term timescale. It’s the same thing as the job application problem. When it is as easy as having a form autofilled and hitting submit (even if there is a moderate fee), you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
geodel 2y ago
It is like saying people are eating less at restaurants in last few years yet Michelin star restaurants have 3 months waitlist. Obviously top rated stuff has high demand and low supply. Further if students are finding lower rank universities less worth the money, many of them would try even harder to get in higher ranked ones.
- p1esk 2y ago
  Is confidence in good schools rising?
  - geodel 2y ago
    Your comment above indicate that.
    - p1esk 2y ago
      Not necessarily. As others said, could be caused by increasing number of applications per applicant, or foreign students. Or maybe increasingly important reasons to graduate from top school that have nothing to do with actual education. If in 5 years AI can do most jobs better than humans, how can a middle class young adult advance up the social ladder?
guccigav 2y ago
Also, the college prep and tutoring industry has been ballooning in the US. Historically, Chinese companies dominated this market in terms of consumer base, but we'll probably see a continuation of this trend in the US too as universities become more selective and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where the more selective you become more students/parents will consider you as more "elite".

tootie 2y ago

It seems all the concerns boil down to economics. I don't think people did nearly as much cost-benefit analysis in the past. The fact that college was affordable meant you were freer to experiment and enjoy yourself. Now that the price is so high, it entails pressure to get your money's worth. Thus creating a vicious cycle.

ryandrake 2y ago
I'm not so sure it's a cycle. Ultimately, employers' requiring a college degree for more and more jobs is what drives the increasing demand, and the increasing demand results in increasing prices. And employers require a college degree because they need some kind of coarse selection screen, and don't seem to have any other way to distinguish capable applicants from incapable ones.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  should increasing demand increase prices?
guccigav 2y ago
The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market, where government regulation suppresses the supply of accredited universities. I think we're seeing some change with the latter supply (e.g. community college, online degrees, etc) but demand for a U.S. college degree still stands strong on the global market from international students. It would be nice to get data on yearly university applications and do an empirical analysis on supply and demand.
- claytongulick 2y ago
  > The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market I think you're missing a big factor, rising admin spend [1]. [1] https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...

guccigav 2y ago

The author should also mention the increase in competition in the labor market and the lack of labor protection laws to prevent outsourcing. Statistically speaking, a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. A lot of the negative sentiments I conjecture come from the higher standards across the board and the ubiquity of a bachelor's degree in the labor market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory

randomdata 2y ago
> a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree. Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
- guccigav 2y ago
  > A person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree. Real income to GDP ratio has been stagnant by some degrees but in this case, we're only looking at average IQ on a normal distribution, average as in 85-115 (or whatever the official range is), assuming that's what you mean by 'spectrum'. e.g. for the average {IQ} or whatever metric you meant in a person, he/she will earn more compared to the same person ceteris paribus, but without a university education.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Humans are way more complicated than IQ. Someone with a high IQ but little ambition is not going to go far in college nor are they going to go far in the economy. People over time is the only reasonably reliable measure we have. And the data is clear: Statistically, people did not start earning more when they started attaining college degrees.

jamesliudotcc 2y ago

> According to a new Gallup poll, Americans are losing the thread with higher education. Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls. This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable? It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down: > 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse. Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring. Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not? It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.

readthenotes1 2y ago
I was going to object to the phrase "losing the thread", as if we are getting confused by an overly complex plot explication. The article is merely self-referential.
ryandrake 2y ago
You shouldn't even need a college degree to proofread mainstream news, which is written at, what, a 5th or 6th grade reading level? K-12 Schools also share the blame for not even remotely educating their students.
- jamesliudotcc 2y ago
  No, of course not, but credentialism.
everybodyknows 2y ago
There's no budget for proofreaders, it's a shoestring org: https://lithub.com/about-literary-hub/ https://lithub.com/about-literary-hub/

cardamomo 2y ago

Am I missing something here? The figures quoted in the opening paragraph suggest to me that confidence is rising. > Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.

Jtsummers 2y ago
https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat... - linked in the first sentence. The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
amalcon 2y ago
Looks like there is a "some" option. For some reason the author quotes one number from one year, a second from the other, and ignores the third option in both. Ignore "not sure" respondents in polls at your own peril.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  The some (there were actually 5 options) line is almost flat: 33, 34, 40, 32. It peaked and then settled back to about 1/3rd of respondents.
TeaBrain 2y ago
It is confusing because the author was really messy with her use of the figures to where that sentence reads nonsensically. The actual Gallup news article that is cited by the article posted is much clearer. The posted article reads as if it was just a re-arranged/scrambled word salad of the original article to the point where some parts no longer make sense. The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat...

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simpaticoder 2y ago

This short article is one person's take on a recent Gallop poll. Here is a direct link to the poll itself: https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat... The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1] The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility. 1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.

throwaway42668 2y ago
I wouldn't even know how to answer the question as presented in the poll. Confidence in higher education to do what?
- Spivak 2y ago
  Yeah, until it materializes in lower rates of people actually going to college people at minimum folks seem pretty confident that it has a return on investment. Also I'm honestly not sure I really care/put any weight into the opinions of random adults whose opinions of higher education are basically a reflection of how universities are portrayed to them in their news bubble. The fact that political affiliation not only matters but matters a great deal means it has little to do with the institutions themselves. I bet you could get the same results with "confidence in science" which is just as vague and nonsensical.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    It has been materializing in fewer people going to college in fact.

vt85 2y ago

[dead]

BrandonMarc 2y ago

When former students need the federal government to bail them out of their debt, it's clear the value of higher ed has plummeted.

declan_roberts 2y ago
It's incredible that they're bailing out loans but not stopping anybody from going down the exact same path. Who exactly wins here?
- Dig1t 2y ago
  I guess the political party who is doling out the money? They get more votes because they get to be the saviors. Not sure, but it does seem like a way to make people reliant on your political party.
- BrandonMarc 2y ago
  The universities and loan compaines win. Who loses? The chump who gets left holding the bag ... taxpayers. As usual.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  When tuition was $1000 (which it used to be in 1970) no one was talking about how getting an English degree could be a catastrophic financial decision. At worst it was a waste of time. Instead of funding universities and managing them like we should be, we handed them over to MBAs who seem to charge more and more every year for the same degree. Obviously federally-guaranteed loans are an idiotic solution to a self-inflicted problem.

Aleksdev 2y ago

A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back. The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills. I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.

standardUser 2y ago
It depends on the size and terms of the loans. I still pay about $75/mo at 3.8% for my loans (20 year later). Going away to college was far, far, far more valuable to me (in terms of fun, adventure, etc) than the cost of that monthly bill.
- betaby 2y ago
  Is that a typical rate? Youtube showed me scary cases of 9%.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    No it is not! I was appalled years later to learn that government-backed loans were being given at such high rates. It just seems cruel. The government has no obligation to turn a profit on student debt.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If you're in the US, the government isn't really profiting on school debt. The government guarantees the debt, but that is a play to protect the banks rather than to drum up profits. Profits really don't matter to a government that can print any money it needs but doesn't currently have.
    - verdverm 2y ago

profsummergig 2y ago

Higher-Ed will become like real oak/maple wood flooring (vs. composite/manufactured). Those who can't afford it won't indulge. Those who can, will, because IYKYK.

mikewarot 2y ago

Long ago, I was told that it was only worth paying for College if you were going to be an Professional Engineer or a Nurse. It seems that advice has held true. I've never pushed my child towards College.

Aleksdev 2y ago
And a real engineer. Not just some basic things where you can just get a certification. Like I tell people, I don’t think you need 4 years to learn basic things like html, css and some JavaScript.
- mikewarot 2y ago
  The HN crowd seems to be quite willing to hand out the title "Engineer" to programmers, and quite touchy about it as well. I meant Professional STATE LICENSED Engineer. Anyone can be a programmer (aka "engineer"), and some are even good at it. ;-)
  - amonith 2y ago
    Fun fact from Poland: Here a real "Professional State Licensed Engineer" degree (anything outside IT) is absolutely NOT worth it because the market for most jobs is local. Only Software "Enginneering" (with or without degree, doesn't matter) is. I do have a masters degree in computer science (software engineering specialization) and since I'm working as a contractor from the start nobody ever saw it or wanted to see it.

eimrine 2y ago

Maybe ed industry has become too regulated to have a chance to be useful? There are a lot of things even a private school can't teach children, for example: government's taxes is just an aggression, proprietary software is evil even if this is "required" by some teacher or institution, history lessons is just propaganda, god is an undefined value etc.

LoganDark 2y ago

I personally lack confidence in higher education because I'm neurodivergent, and high school pushed a method of learning that is not compatible with the way in which my brain works. They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate - it is the source of the "how will this ever be useful later in life?" that is oft-cited of students. I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out. I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself. I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.

kenjackson 2y ago
I think most people learn the same way you describe. But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work. I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
- hilbert42 2y ago
  "But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work." ...And many go on to become teachers and textbook writers thus perpetuating the problem for students who absorb information differently to the way they do. We need multiple approaches to teaching, unfortunately they're not seen as conducive with efficiency, minimizing syllabus material, keeping teachers' numbers to a minimum, etc. (See my comment to the same post.)

declan_roberts 2y ago

I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree. I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off. It's cruel and immoral and must change.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
You only end up 100k in the hole if you eschew your perfectly good public in state option. That's part of the reason. Public colleges recruiting at high schools out of state are straight up doing it in bad faith.
tzs 2y ago
> I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off. That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid. Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that. Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1]. I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years. They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived). [1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student-debt https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...

Barrin92 2y ago

>This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls. This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media. There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2] I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines. [1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 [2]https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-a015-4647-8e07-b60749492be1/jdp-econ-party-aug.png?v=5710b2ed1cee1bdfd30cb9c02455b43d https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-...

EGreg 2y ago

Why teach kids stuff that will be obsolete by the time they come of age to work? AI is going to do to most subjects what calculators did to arithmetic, and desktop publishing did to cursive writing. Is anyone learning their times tables and calligraphy today for everyday use? Sadly, star trek had it right — once you’re hooked up to the borg hive mind with neuralink, it’s not even clear what any individual has to add to “the collective”. Change my mind! Or in 30 years: “Change our mind”

rr808 2y ago

My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college. I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things. I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised. System seems screwed up.

Aurornis 2y ago
> My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college Top 10 colleges are a completely different game. Nobody needs to go to a top 10 university. It’s a game for the most competitive to play. It’s not equivalent to higher education in general.
- kredd 2y ago
  Outside of global top 50, ROI decreases to the point where you start considering where it is actually worth it. That was at least my thought process back in the days when I was applying to universities.
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    Care to quantify this?
  - elric 2y ago
    Where I'm from, a 4 year stint in higher education is about as expensive as a month's wages. It gets more expensive if you need student housing, but many students can and do commute. Most young folks can study something that interests them, at little risk. No one here has to worry about the ROI of their offspring's studies, nor do they have to worry about their prepubescent child starting charities (or whatever other insane nonsense) in order to qualify for some insanely expensive elitist college. Seems like a much more sensible approach than putting a fuckton of pressure on kids in order to get them in a college which will land them with 30 years of debt on top of a potential degree. Let kids be kids, and give students a chance to learn and explore.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Higher education is not a great filter anymore. Everyone goes to college - and most students simply don’t have the fundamental intelligence for it to mean much. Colleges have also changed - there are large numbers of activist degrees that seem to not really be serious fields. People get degrees in such fields that aren’t economically valuable and then struggle in the job market. If you’re studying something that personally interests you but isn’t useful to others (as the job market suggests), aren’t you just doing a hobby? And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.

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_the_inflator 2y ago

Higher education is personally very challenging and not how people were designed. Even those with some standard deviation above the mean aren't meant to study books all day. This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps. It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning). In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting. When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional. Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.

janalsncm 2y ago

What’s clear to me is that our feeling about University is a bit like the Anna Karenina quote: Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In other words, a lot of people are unhappy with college, but everyone has their own ax to grind about why. I will say that I have never experienced any ideological purity tests that conservatives are constantly complaining about. Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.

eimrine 2y ago
So you have happened to finish the grade in US without publicly saying the following words even once - "all races are equal"? It sounds too unbelivable.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Yeah we never had to read Karl Marx either.
  - eimrine 2y ago
    That is not "either", you just got to have another sort of propaganda.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  Nope. But I did have to do the pledge of allegiance every day until high school.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  That's what you find objectionable?
  - eimrine 2y ago
    Making a zombie from a human is very objectionable for me even if the content of perpetrator's speaking is legit. If your learning environment suffers from a censourship too much to have an ability to say "I don't want to live with Muslim family in one neibourhood" in school so why the big bro insists the students to say something about race situation? The school got to teach but it also loves to shape.

Narhem 2y ago

Not surprised as most majors don't leaf to valuable jobs and higher education turn from an attempt to help the younger generation to business.

WhatsTheBigIdea 2y ago

What does "confidence" mean exactly? Regardless, I'm sure that the students actually in college are there for "all the right reasons."

richardanaya 2y ago

AI will challenge the reasons we go to college even more.

iftheshoefitss 2y ago

Higher ed was the driving force for a lot of the protests etc was bound to be “punished” for lack of a better word same with Hollywood the devil works hard but farm boys work even harder

satisfice 2y ago

When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match. The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead. I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate. I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision. I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.

hilbert42 2y ago

I have acquired both trade and university/academic skills but most of my career has involved the latter. When employing my trade-learnt skills I apply myself in a quite different manner to that when I'm working in my more formalized profession, and in some ways I've found that way of working more enjoyable. Achieving or creating things with one's hands can be most satisfying. About 40 years ago trade-based skills such as woodworking, metalwork, tooling, crafts, etc. that employed a large percentage of the workforce fell out of favor and that a career that required a college/university education was seen to be more financially rewarding. This resulted in a huge increase in the numbers who attended college/university. Leaving aside politics, I think it's time to reappraise our educational needs, and we should stop looking down upon jobs that involve manual work/dexterity as we've done in the recent past. Moreover, we shouldn't forget that until the age of high tech and automation most work was of a manual dexterous nature and productively therefrom provided most of our needs. Not all but much of that is still relevant. I know what I'm saying flies in the face of modern automation, computerization and smart working, etc. And I acknowledge that my view is counterintuitive given current trends in today's world. Nevertheless, from what I've observed, many, many people don't want or have need to know the intricate workings of advanced engineering and technology, or unfathomable facts about the physical world such as why α is ≈1/137. I'd thus suggest that in many instances a university education has not necessarily been the best fit or outcome for many people. Perhaps it's only now that many are beginning to realize the benefits of acquiring an advanced education are just not worth the time and effort not to mention its inordinately high cost. And to some extent we now may be seeing a reversal of the problem we had before the current trend of seeing a college education as a necessity—that's where many who were suited to a college education were unable to receive one through lack of finances and such. Little doubt the picture is more complex than I've painted it. Irrespective, I'm not for a moment arguing or agreeing that we should dumb down education in any way. In fact I'd argue the opposite, which is that we need to better educate and train people in ways that most suit both their abilities and personal traits/personalities so they lead more fruitful lives. Furthermore, I'd argue that as a society we need a better understanding of both the educational needs of individuals and those required by society for it to function properly, and that this is urgent because of major changes and developments in manufacturing, with the impact of AI and other significant changes within society. These changes are already having a profound impact on what people do and how they go about doing it. It's all the more urgent we address these issues now because change is occurring with ever-increasing rapidity. I'll finish by saying that for the benefit of both those who are being educated and of society generally we must dispel the somewhat elitist notion that's often seen in academia and by many employers that those who work in the trades are doing low and menial work and that they are so employed because they are either incapable of more advanced academic work or are otherwise unsuited for it. Such notions aren't helpful for many reasons but the most obvious one is that they skew the numbers of those who go into trades and professions and the impact of this skewing is negative. Also, it's important to stress that many trades require considerable training as well as the development of excellent skills together with lots of experience, especially so if they are to be performed well. Essentially, much work that's now deemed as trades-based is far from being menial. Next, some of the smartest people I know work in the trades and I'd put them up against many who've more formal qualifications. Also, from my observation, many of the people who I've encountered who are happiest and live the most contented lives are trades people.

Eumenes 2y ago

I like to refer to higher education as legacy education. As someone who skipped college and jumped right into the workforce after the dot com boom, I was renting an apartment/paying my own bills/managing my own affairs by the time I was 21. I had to figure everything out on my own. I was making 60k/year in a big city maintaining websites and helping the small media company I worked at with IT problems. My comp is in the high 200s/low 300s these days. No formal education. When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character. I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.

big-green-man 2y ago
I think youre 100% right. Taking it further, it's legacy education because there are no effective gatekeepers to information anymore. You can learn anything you want now for free. If the goal is to learn how to do something you want to do, universities aren't worth the expense. They gatekeep credentials now, not education. I personally do not think that status quo can continue for very long. I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
saagarjha 2y ago
Ok, but you do realize that living on 60k in a large city is not particularly easy these days? You'll be putting down half your salary to rent, at the minimum. Same applies to the other jobs: sure, you build character. But you're also perpetually one car accident away from financial ruin.

BigParm 2y ago

Educated competent people being paid dogshit is becoming more common.

egberts1 2y ago

That moment the higher education took a HUGE swandive into the empty cement pond, is when their admission no longer relies on SAT/ACT. Soon, LSAT and others to follow. It is like the state no longer demanding an occupational license, leaving consumers rudderless in getting quality workman. I for one will only be checkibg for medical degrees that have SAT and MCAT admission in force policy. This act only disservice those hardworking and legitimate grads. https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-dont-require-the-mcat-what-you-should-know https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/medical-schools-that-d...