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A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time. Nowaday
by jqpabc123 2y ago
A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time.
Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt.
Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value.
Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.
- lunar-whitey 2y agoThe public school and financial systems in the US are set up to retain ignorant students in economically worthless degree programs and saddle them with the costs for the rest of their lives. Not pursuing any degree at all (because one cannot identify which degrees might be valuable enough to avoid this trap) is an obvious reaction.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoThat completely fails to explain the gender gap, unless women are just less savvy than men.
- jqpabc123 2y agoThe facts I presented transcend gender. But here are some that are gender related. Women make up 58% of all college students. Women hold 67% of all student loan debt. Personally, I looked but failed to find much to discredit your "less savvy" explanation.
- UncleMeat 2y agoThere is some evidence that part of the effect is explained by women needing to go to college more than men in order to get decently paying jobs. This is less true today than 20 years ago, as we've seen real wages of men without college degrees drop since the financial crisis, but the trend of more women attending college started well before that.