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Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
- carlosjobim 11mo agoCollege degrees now have negative value for hiring. A company wanting to hire a reliable and competent worker will avoid college graduates.
- ungreased0675 11mo agoSeems like you’re hurting some feelings. I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
- carlosjobim 11mo agoMy comment is generalizing, as is the thread subject. It has been a downwards moving trend, and for young workers I will say that a college degree is now a negative factor. But that doesn't define the candidate. Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
- venturecruelty 11mo agoSure, get the high school dropout to build your bridge for you. See how well that non-traditional hire works out.
- ungreased0675 11mo agoBecoming a Professional Engineer requires four years experience under the guidance of an already licensed engineer and passing a rigorous exam. No fresh college graduate is qualified to design bridges, same as the high school dropout.
- J0n3s1n 11mo ago[dead]
- throwaway21321 11mo ago1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
- Beijinger 11mo agoMy roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns....
- Beijinger 11mo agoWhy the Downvote? It is true.
- SanjayMehta 11mo agoIt's due to your username; they think you're a troll.
- Beijinger 11mo agoWell. I love Beijing. But I am not Chinese, nor do I currently live in China. Unfortunately.
- 11101010001100 11mo agoIt may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair.
- Beijinger 11mo agoWell, if someone feels extremely inferior, true. Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation. I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
- b59831 11mo ago[dead]
- b3ing 11mo agoI guess so mostly foreign students and the wealthier folks can get them? Doesn’t seem like a win, but with AI taking jobs, who knows
- jaccola 11mo agoI feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees: - People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life! - People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives! In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives. It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
- echelon_musk 11mo agoI like to call this degree inflation.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoConsider the contraposition. • Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives. • Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished. It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
- Aeolun 11mo agoMake money not a consideration in applying for college? Not by handing out whatever the universities are asking for of course, but by giving them a fixed $X per student.
- drivingmenuts 11mo agoThat might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.
- Aeolun 11mo ago
- wat10000 11mo agoThe pendulum swings. College was only for the elite. Then it slowly expanded until it got to the point of, “everyone should go to college, doesn’t matter what you study.” Now it’s swinging back. Hopefully we manage to get to a reasonable place and not go all the way back to college only being for elites.
- tgma 11mo agoObviously if you want to learn, there has never been as many resources as today for free with YouTube and other stuff. College remains only relevant for the piece of paper and networking and the four-year party experience.
- crims0n 11mo agoMy kids will still go to a four-year university, but for the education and experience, not for any vocational aspirations. I have no delusions about the marketability of an undergraduate degree. A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
- yoyohello13 11mo ago> A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
- roamerz 11mo ago>> but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world. Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
- OGEnthusiast 11mo agoAgreed. Going to college for the social experience and for generally learning about the world is effectively a luxury good now. For people who just want a path to stable employment, the ROI on college no longer makes sense at all.
- yoyohello13 11mo agoI think our society’s obsession with thinking of everything in terms of ROI is destructive.
- yoyohello13 11mo agoThat’s kind of my point. Everyone wants to narrowly focus on what will bring them the most value as quickly as possible. Being educated in a wide array of subjects doesn’t seem useful at first, but it actually makes you a better communicator, and citizen. Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
- HardwareLust 11mo agoWhat's the point? You're either going to be replaced by AI or a robot (or both) anyway.
- DaSHacka 11mo ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 11mo agoUniversities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoSomeone should turn that comment into a Twilight Zone episode... We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed. No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein... So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
- paulorlando 11mo agoBetter than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
- rahimnathwani 11mo agoMany (most?) people go to college primarily for the piece of paper, not for the educational and social experience.
- Aeolun 11mo agoYou can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
- crossbody 11mo agoDid Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education? Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over. Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
- ahartmetz 11mo agoWas it much more subsidized in the US when it was much cheaper, though?
- crossbody 11mo agoI'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mikert89 11mo agoEmployers just hire experienced h1bs instead, they won’t leave after being trained, no reason to hire an American
- bequanna 11mo agoThe h1b program can essentially be eliminated tomorrow. Trump could theoretically make h1b visas non-transferable, charge a high annual renewal, etc.
- chillycharlie 11mo agoTrump could cancel H1B but most likely he won't. If for no other reason than as a favour to his billionaire friends. They are more important than the popular idea of America first, American jobs etc. here Trump literally says we need H1B because we need talent, and USA doesn't have the talent. Not a good look for a supposedly America first president.. https://youtu.be/U2XUNKcKtx0?si=GOFyMGxqUIbyGD6T https://youtu.be/U2XUNKcKtx0?si=GOFyMGxqUIbyGD6T
- chank 11mo agoAnd Americans leave because employers will just replace them with offshoring and h1bs to save money. It's a self perpetuating cycle. Loyalty goes both ways. Employees finally realized that they should be treating employers like employers have always treated employees. That's capitalism.
- Newlaptop 11mo agoThere are ~700k h1bs out of ~157 million American jobs. So about 99.6% of jobs in America are held by Americans and 0.4% by h1bs.
- yahway 11mo agoNow do the tech industry (high paying American jobs)
- 11mo ago
- randcraw 11mo agoAs the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing. I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me. The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
- abeppu 11mo ago> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing. > The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost. I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously: - student-faulty ratios have gotten worse - schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes - good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway - much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris... Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
- anonymouskimmer 11mo agoDedicated grad schools that are separate from, but affiliated with, dedicated undergrad schools. Those teaching at the dedicated undergrad schools will be hired for their ability to focus on foundational teaching, with research programs designed to involve undergraduate student researchers in genuine research, while still providing publication opportunities and genuine advancement of the art.
- crossbody 11mo agoMost of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work. Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
- chillycharlie 11mo agoThose degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
- crossbody 11mo agoThat's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
- sojournerc 11mo agoYou don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
- crossbody 11mo agoWould you say all people have the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness? If not, we need _some_ way of saying who is, so that they could be matched to higher complexity jobs. It's far for perfect but it works somewhat
- linguae 11mo agoI’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy. However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school. I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam. However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy. Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
- anon291 11mo agoHow about just not inflating grades?
- AngryData 11mo agoNo shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
- fuckinpuppers 11mo agoDoesn’t help when leaders are trashing it and classifying things as not “professional” to further put up more barriers to entry. Along with the constant attacks about them being indoctrination centers, pulling funding for being too liberal, or not pro-Israel enough, or whatever else this administration has officially been able to strongarm many institutions about.
- wyldfire 11mo agoAmericans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity. But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
- parpfish 11mo agoreason (3) is social signaling. elite schools aren't only desirable because they set you up with big opportunities. they are the way for high-school overachievers to signal to everybody how smart and good they are. elite schools could probably make bank if they just sold a stamp-of-approval from their admissions committees that just said "you are smart enough to get admitted, but were not lucky enough to win the lottery of being given a seat".
- EgregiousCube 11mo ago100%, but it's even worse than that. "X got into Stanford" is the new "X is a Stanford graduate" because of grade dilution - and admissions dilution has soured even the former.
- lurk2 11mo agoThere was a user here a few months ago trying to promote his startup. He was being somewhat obnoxious when people offered criticism so I looked him up and found he was some 21 year old kid. Profile read: > Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders. > Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council. > Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF. The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.
- black_13 11mo ago[dead]
- jswelker 11mo agoHigher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts. And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
- lovich 11mo agoI was told in college that the US system of healthcare being tied to your employer was the result of companies looking for fringe benefits to offer when tax rates were at their highest for the high income group. However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
- pdonis 11mo agoIt started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.
- eli_gottlieb 11mo agoAs with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.
- angst 11mo agoThis is worrisome. College experience does provide unique benefits compared to self-learning.
- logicchains 11mo agoBut in the long term it seems to destroy the ability to self-learn; the vast majority of graduates go out of their way to avoid acquiring any new academic knowledge after graduation. College (aside from phd programs) fails at teaching people how to learn.
- maxlybbert 11mo agoColleges need to figure out how to advertise those benefits, and the colleges' role in providing the benefits. The fact that they've been flat-footed for a decade tells me either (1) they're incredibly bad communicators, or (2) they don't really believe their own claims.
- chasing 11mo agoThey're wonderful but, yes, the cost is out of control. Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.
- stack_framer 11mo agoI dropped out after my university added various "studies" courses to the required list. I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
- anonymouskimmer 11mo agoYou may have had a bad instructor. I don't think I've ever been in a class where I couldn't do some genuine questioning, but of course I didn't always feel the need to do so. Edit to add: Also, you failed to learn the lesson that you can't always quit in the face of tyranny. Did you never have a history or civics class in high school?
- WorkerBee28474 11mo agoBut were any of your classes gender studies?
- anonymouskimmer 11mo agoNo. I had one that had something to do with anthropology though.
- mapontosevenths 11mo agoWhich viewpoint did you oppose? It matters. If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
- csa 11mo ago> Which viewpoint did you oppose? It matters. > If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate. I was in a class like this at an elite school 3 decades ago. I was told by two other students that my role as a cis straight white male was to say nothing or validate what others said. This was during a time that the core concepts of what is currently called DEI were being fleshed out. My “sin” was asking whether certain research and data were being reported and represented accurately (they weren’t). The creative interpretations led to policy suggestions that were about 180 degrees from what the author intended. How did I know that? I knew the researcher and had discussed it with him directly. That class was an absolute circle jerk, and it’s the kind of circle jerk that gives progressives a very bad name while being completely unnecessary (i.e., many parts of the progressive agenda have plenty of solid research support without wildly creative interpretations). Anyway, the professor in this class was having none of it. He appreciated my questions. That said, half the class thought I was satan incarnate.
- nashashmi 11mo agoTotal cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money. Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years. My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- AxiomaticSpace 11mo agoThis assumes that every college grad is guaranteed a decent starting income. It seems that on average new grads are struggling more now than they used to to get jobs in their fields, especially higher paying jobs. And that perception is probably magnified by internet horror stories such as every 3rd post on r/cscareers.
- nashashmi 11mo agoYes this kind of math doesn’t make sense in places and industries where pay is not high and job prospects are difficult. Like liberal arts. Or third world countries. And that is the point: do the math that assesses the incomes correctly and many people won’t see as college as sensible for those professions.
- rfrey 11mo agoI'm not sure where your numbers come from. In my region job prospects are not much better for a liberal arts grad than a high school graduate, and much, much worse than someone with a trades education.
- naet 11mo agoAnecdotally my wife came very close to finishing a 4 year degree but ultimately did not for various reasons (she comes from a very disadvantaged family...) and not having one has been a major burden or blocker for her pursuing all kinds of jobs. I am hoping to help her finish, but it is hard to restart later in life and lots of past credits will probably be lost or not count anymore due to various academic bureaucracy roadblocks.
- daft_pink 11mo agoI’m really shocked that everyone is running to cyclical industrial/construction type jobs that are great in an economic expansion, but awful in a downturn.
- b3ing 11mo agoWith AI, h1b, other visa workers, and outsourcing it makes sense they see it as a waste. Those things aren’t going to change, either.
- rich_sasha 11mo agoMeanwhile, China is churning out STEM graduates at breakneck pace. Sure, not every single one is Nobel prize material, but 7 mainland China universities are now in Times' top 100, and another 5 Hong Kong ones as well.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tokioyoyo 11mo agoI’m still heavily subscribed to the idea that global access to social media ruined the kids’ expectations. Everything else is downstream effects of unrealized expectations. In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
- wwalker2112 11mo agoBecause they are not. If I was 18 years old right now, I'd be going into a trade of some sort. No debt, immediately earning a decent amount of money. AI will push even more kids towards this route.
- esperent 11mo agoI'm Irish. The state paid me to go to university, and I've paid it back many times over in taxes. Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there. I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
- blindriver 11mo ago"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance. One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic. Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans. The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
- anonzzzies 11mo agoI went to uni to learn to learn. It helped that it was free, but it was a rigorous education with formal proofs (starting in week 1), proper research, scientific writing etc. Very few people will learn that outside universities, and, while not strictly needed for most jobs, it really helps as a tool to shut 'talkers' up to this day. Socially it was good as well; got my first and second project for my tiny company I set up in uni from the father's of two study mates: the first project was 100k, the second 1.6m (both guilders at time), so there is that; I would have never known these people otherwise.
- swydydct 11mo agoYeah I never get what these other comments are talking about with college not being useful. I basically learned my profession in college and now hire people who have done the same thing.
- anonym29 11mo agoThere is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. The social environment can be replicated for free. You're not paying six figures for an education, you're paying six figures for exactly two things: 1. Someone to write lesson plans for you 2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoWhat you need is the exams! Maybe $1000 to sit a bunch of paper or computer based exams in a hall. Teach yourself beforehand.
- baq 11mo ago> There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. This is trivially false outside of some math, CS and sweng. Even within IT learning networking at an above basic level requires a well equipped lab.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 11mo agoReminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvkojqk2l https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko... Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end? Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that. They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway. A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/the-case-against-education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
- bombcar 11mo agoCompletely unironically your best bet is to get into a good college, then do the minimum work needed to graduate and spend al the rest of the time networking (read: partying).
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 11mo agoYep, meet as many people as you can who might later give you a job or ask you to join their startup. Meet a potential spouse, you're in the same social class, about the same age, probably similar interests. You are alumni of the same institution. Do sports, drink beers, learn social skills.
- viccis 11mo ago>Is this not rational behavior? If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure. If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job. Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
- Aperocky 11mo agoAlmost nobody seem to see college as a place where people can develop the skills to learn itself? Did it get that bad? It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing. It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.
- wvenable 11mo agoDeveloping skills to learn is great but when one is struggling to pay for housing, food, and other essentials then that becomes a luxury that fewer and fewer can afford.
- RomanPushkin 11mo agoDon't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.
- cherrycherry98 11mo agoNothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo agoThey are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free". The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
- lurk2 11mo ago> The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service. That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
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- hk1337 11mo agoI think we, as a society, put way too much emphasis on everyone going to a four-year college and now everyone has a degree and they’re basically useless. A lot of people would likely have been better off going to a trade school or going into a trade apprenticeship. Parents should focus on helping their kids figure out what they want to do and developing a path to achieve it. The path may take them to university, a trade, or something else.
- chokominto 11mo agoMaybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..
- willmadden 11mo ago[flagged]
- donkeybeer 11mo agoAsk the women if they want to be dependent purely on their family or man.
- alanchen 11mo agoI encourage everyone to read how Economists think about education: Spencer’s Job Market Signaling paper. https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf It’s not just about learning skills, but it’s a natural and rational mechanism to filter talents.
- constantcrying 11mo agoThe problem is that no one can really articulate what the point of higher education is. If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job. If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive. If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen? If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
- hdb385 11mo ago[dead]
- apparent 11mo agoThe downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings. And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future. Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.
- jillesvangurp 11mo agoThere's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US. From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
- armchairhacker 11mo agoI can vouch for studying abroad. But can you get loans and scholarships for it as easily as studying at home? Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.
- deanishe 11mo ago> Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing. A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.
- ggambetta 11mo agoMy degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).
- jghn 11mo agoThere is no way that you got that degree recent enough such that the years matter. An undergrad/master degree really only matters for the first, perhaps second job. After that, your experience and ability is what matters.
- mixmastamyk 11mo agoThere are many jobs that effectively require masters degrees today, because there are too many applicants and it’s a convenient way to filter them.
- OhioMan2943 11mo ago*some
- zkmon 11mo agoEducation in modern times is only about training and certifying workforce so that employers can easily filter the prospective employees. If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.
- kopirgan 11mo agoIIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value. I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles. Employers probably decided to avoid them. That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
- armchairhacker 11mo agoDo you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges? I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without. EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
- walthamstow 11mo agoI don't know about actively avoiding, but I have worked for multiple companies in London who prefer not to hire at the 'top' end of candidates (hence hiring me!), because they'll cost more and can have cultural issues like not be very fun people or thinking themselves to be above the self-taught and weird-career guys who didn't get a first from Imperial.
- kopirgan 11mo agoThere's lot of anecdotal chatter and also mainstream media coverage on this.. It's a genuine concern. But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all. The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.
- lgleason 11mo agoIt would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes. When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoPolls really need to start adding filter questions like "Do vaccines work?" "Did humans evolve from small mammals?" because some people not believing something works is actually a positive signal. Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.
- ben_w 11mo agoI believe many do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_Constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Lizardman's_C... I've certainly seen YouGov surveys asking if I'd ever visited (IIRC) some tiny town in Alaska, presumably to weed out people who just say "yes" to everything. Recent quiz question from Tom Scott's Lateral podcast was along the same lines but for being qualified to pilot a military submarine.
- xzjis 11mo agoWhile Western countries are making education increasingly private, expensive, and accessible only to the elite, in China, free education accessible to all is training engineers who then go on to work for companies that outperform those of other countries.
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoIt seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane. When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address. I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then). Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoIMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
- numbsafari 11mo agoMost of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so? Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoYeah that’s true. But a paid education doesn’t provide too much motivation anyway. College education is stuffed with unnecessary courses not everyone needs but you have to take anyway. Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
- numbsafari 11mo agoI didn’t take a single unnecessary course. The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoThat's true, but without that piece of paper you're not getting past the hiring filters to even hope of landing an interview to showcase your skills to even get the lowest entry level job that's not flipping burgers. A college degree is the new high school degree.
- nikanj 11mo agoFour-year anything is not seen as worth the cost, when every platform firehoses you with stories about people who became billionaires in 7 months. Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now 1: https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
- peterlada 11mo agoIn unrelated news: China graduates more engineers then ever before.
- bojangleslover 11mo agoSupply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down. No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare. [1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~:text=Report%20Highlights.,American%20men%20have%20college%20degrees. https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- immibis 11mo agoA degree isn't SUPPOSED to be an arbitrary differentiator. It's supposed to signal that you know a certain thing because you studied it for 4 years. Whether that's currently true in America I couldn't say.
- Workaccount2 11mo agoThe problem is the funneling of dispassionate kids into college who just pick something and then game their way as much as possible to that piece of paper. Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
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- weakfish 11mo agoCan we name this "HN's Law," where any thread remotely related to economics will have someone attributing everything to supply and demand?
- bojangleslover 11mo ago
- nemo44x 11mo agoThe 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness. The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
- dan-robertson 11mo agoMaybe one thing to keep in mind is that there are a big range of colleges in the US. If you go to a poorly regarded party school then probably you have a good time and maybe even get some useful connections out of it, but the main advantage is presumably being able to check the ‘college degree’ box when applying to relatively ordinary jobs. If you go to Harvard then (a) you pay much less if you have limited means and (b) your future prospects are probably significantly better from the experience (this is a bit complicated – a lot of the good outcomes are due to capable and ambitious inputs so the direct benefit of the degree is more limited). It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own). When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it. Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
- chongli 11mo agoThe signalling hypothesis (of Bryan Caplan [1]) lurks within your two premises. Neither the poorly regarded party school nor Harvard add much in the way of human capital. What both do is act as honest signals of intelligence, ability, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness (including family resources). These are extremely valuable indicators for prospective employers who are otherwise prohibited (by law) from asking or testing these directly and punished (through wasted wages, training costs, benefits) for making a mistake. In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
- dan-robertson 11mo agoI certainly learned a lot of mathematics at university that I probably wouldn’t have learned without it. Perhaps more importantly was some amount of mathematical maturity. The former has probably not been that useful in my career (idk maybe some linear algebra?) and the latter maybe a little bit, but if one were trying to figure out the optimal things to learn for my job, they probably wouldn’t have been what I studied.
- UltraSane 11mo agoWe need to bring back apprenticeships. They are the most effective method of transferring knowledge.
- swydydct 11mo agoI’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
- maxlybbert 11mo agoI'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agoHaving taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a different name. Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.
- swydydct 11mo agoYeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.
- ChicagoDave 11mo agoThis was the intended result in the 80’s when Reagan destroyed public college subsidies. White rich people hated competition from poor and brown people. That whole even playfield thing was their nightmare. Ask the rich families if college degrees are still important. You’ll get a different answer.
- lvl155 11mo agoCollege is still worth it for maybe the top 100 schools especially well-funded state schools. Why? Because people still get hired based on such a connection alone. Think about Waterloo. It’s a mediocre school with a strong pipeline to SV. You wanna end up at SV but didn’t study hard in high school or just weren’t smart enough for MIT/Stanford? Go to Waterloo.
- NickC25 11mo agotruth told nothing in American society is truly worth the cost. especially with rampant inflation. we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.
- earlyreturns 11mo agoWhy pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? I can see why those in h1b’d industries like cs don’t see any point, and those are the industries where the most jobs and money have historically been. As goes the STEM labor market so goes the market for stuff like accounting, communications, sociology. A fair and secure labor market is a necessary condition for higher education to pay off. American workers compete for jobs with a global workforce, therefore American universities must be cost competitive with those in India, China, etc…. Tenure is like tarrifs, the cost of protectionism is paid by the consumer.
- thinkingtoilet 11mo agoI work for a small Us-based med-tech company that is growing. We are paring down our offshore devs and hiring only US based devs now. I can assure you that if you have a good school on your resume it puts you at the top of the list. All things being equal, if you went to University of Vermont (like I did) and and someone else when to Harvard, you better believe I'm interviewing the Harvard kid first. >Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
- earlyreturns 11mo agoQualifications are easily and frequently faked and most people who write code for a living have seen competent people replaced by low cost semi-competents who excel at getting hired but little else. Interviews have gotten much more onerous, but the average level of skill has not increased.
- standardUser 11mo agoThe question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime". The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
- softwaredoug 11mo agoI find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good. There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service. But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
- rglynn 11mo agoIn my experience, it has the opposite effect. Those who go straight into work are exposed to the real world, people of different ages and life experience. New grads are still children by comparison to a 19/20 year old who has been working for 2-4 years.
- estimator7292 11mo agoCapitalists have sucked all available liquid assets from the economy and are shocked-- shocked to learn what happens when people don't have enough money to buy non-essentials. Look forward to an article like this about every economic sector every few months
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- 65 11mo agoMy theory is public state schools will become much more prestigious, as non extremely rich kids will find spending $75k on tuition to just not be worth it when you can go to your local state flagship for a fraction of the price. Plus, most of the most prestigious schools in other countries are public schools (e.g. UT and UBC in Canada, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK). As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans. Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.
- matt-p 11mo agoThey're absolutely not, but I think 18 is also young to go into the workplace straight from school. I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing. We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.
- thelastgallon 11mo agoCollege is for partying. It is the right age to party, raging hormones and all that. Frats, sororities. It is the most fun/$. Escape out of parents control. Do what you want with whoever you want. Anybody looking for education is looking at the wrong place, most everything is available to self-learn.
- mullingitover 11mo agoPeter Thiel seen rubbing his greasy palms together at this news. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that he somehow engineered this poll himself. Thiel and his ilk are eager to shove the US back into feudalism, with themselves at the top like some kind of warmed-over Borgia family. An educated populace that is capable of operating a democracy competently is absolutely intolerable for them.
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- user294812092 11mo agoWe need to spend so much on healthcare and education that we can no longer afford our wars and imperial misadventures
- tanin 11mo agoThe fact that the student debt crisis is going on shows that colleges are not worth it. If it was, most would have been able to pay it back. My impression is, unless you can get into a top X college, it isn't worth it. This also depends on the cost of course. My university in Thailand back then was 1,000 USD per year, so that seems worth it, even tho it isn't in the top 20.
- billy99k 11mo agoThe problem is that because lots of people have a degree now, employers have no problem finding candidates by requiring one. So now, almost all white collar jobs require a degree. You may not ever be able to move into management without one either.
- gishh 11mo agoI graduated high school in 2005. I had been making and running websites and forums (phpbb anyone?) since 1998…ish? I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere. As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions. I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.
- metalman 11mo agohttps://www.npr.org/2021/12/01/1058326127/wet-leg-tiny-desk-home-concert https://www.npr.org/2021/12/01/1058326127/wet-leg-tiny-desk-... opening lyrics of first song