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This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years i

This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well by having a middle class that is not just productive, but truly educated. It’s weird and it has problems, but it’s also wonderful, and we should not try to sever the two so we can more “efficiently” crank out credentials.

rayiner 10mo ago
That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans. Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
  - rayiner 10mo ago
    Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
    - monero-xmr 10mo ago
      I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
      - rayiner 10mo ago
        If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
        eastbound 10mo ago
        The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
        potato3732842 10mo ago
        >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
        pjmlp 10mo ago
        The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 10mo ago
    >things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
    - seec 10mo ago
      That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
  - maxglute 10mo ago
    > in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
    - potato3732842 10mo ago
      Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
      - mlinhares 10mo ago
        I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
  - bildung 10mo ago
    > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
    - phillipcarter 10mo ago
      Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
- RVuRnvbM2e 10mo ago
  The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
- spankalee 10mo ago
  > When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then. But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
  - WillPostForFood 10mo ago
    US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
- danans 10mo ago
  > The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore. That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
  - jswelker 10mo ago
    Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
  - bombcar 10mo ago
    Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
    - danans 10mo ago
      I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
      - K0balt 10mo ago
- nobodyandproud 10mo ago
  Correlation-only is sloppy analysis. The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem. But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight. The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family. Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
  - overfeed 10mo ago
    > The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
    - lurk2 10mo ago
      > when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics. Langbert notes: > The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-survey-political-leanings-liberal-conservative-moderate-centrist-harvard-yale-variation-across-school-tenure-status-demographics-20241022 https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su... > When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.” Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-report-2024/ https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep... > Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
- doctorpangloss 10mo ago
  are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
  - ggm 10mo ago
    A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to" When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers. I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
    - expedition32 10mo ago
      It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true. Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.
- Dylan16807 10mo ago
  What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers. They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
- Swenrekcah 10mo ago
  The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing. It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost. Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
- firesteelrain 10mo ago
  The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
  - dmix 10mo ago
    It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
    - firesteelrain 10mo ago
      Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
      - dmix 10mo ago
        Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2 There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
- zbzdrol 10mo ago
  > A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally? The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r. The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
  - jimnotgym 10mo ago
    > You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
  - NickC25 10mo ago
    >You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. "I love the poorly educated" ~our current president.
- locknitpicker 10mo ago
  > When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
  - rayiner 10mo ago
    The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war. America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion. The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college_students_average_iq_has_fallen_17_points_since_1939_1006608.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
- docfath 10mo ago
  > A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes… China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room. The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also. One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
- sharts 10mo ago
  Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- spicyusername 10mo ago
  Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that. So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
- rixed 10mo ago
  Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?
epicureanideal 10mo ago
Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?
jswelker 10mo ago
It's an interesting combo, but after working for a decade in higher ed, there is a real division and enmity between the liberal arts and sciences and the "career" programs. The latter is seen as an illegitimate degree mill. The former as a freeloader that does not pull its weight financially. It is an uneasy partnership of convenience.
- sagarm 10mo ago
  I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.
  - jswelker 10mo ago
    It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities. Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.
mc32 10mo ago
What they crank out today suffers from grade inflation. No longer is 'C' the average grade. Kids and parents who pay over 100k for their diploma all demand above average grades. It's not as bad as presenting a diploma from a Caribbean diploma mill, but they're not what they used to be.
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.
  - drnick1 10mo ago
    That already exists, it's called an A+.
  - Mountain_Skies 10mo ago
    American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.
  - trashface 10mo ago
    Many games already have an S-tier in class/stats/builds, whatever the criteria is. Would be funny if higher ed ripped that off. Life mimicking art and all that.
hc12345 10mo ago
Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid. But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
- jswelker 10mo ago
  The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.
  - haritha-j 10mo ago
    Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.
    - 10mo ago
wavemode 10mo ago
It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons). That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.
- SpicyLemonZest 10mo ago
  Everything's a societal reason from some angle. We've probably tilted a bit too hard towards college as a universal path, but I think the median college-degree-required job would still tell you that they're trying to find people who value education and learning for its own sake. The best doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. are the intellectually curious ones who don't see education as a burden.
  - trimethylpurine 10mo ago
    Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.
  - conductr 10mo ago
    You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances. I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years. We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact. This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.
nebula8804 10mo ago
This comment would make more sense if more than ~38% of the country had a college degree. Can you really make the argument that college is truly a middle class concept if not even half of the populations has a bachelor's degree? I guess if you include community college which has really helped to serve the downtrodden get on their dream paths then I guess it makes more sense?
- seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
  Middle class doesn’t necessarily mean average or median class, but rather some life style bar where you aren’t struggling even if you can’t afford many luxuries. In India, for example, the middle class is small (definitely not average!) but growing. Having a college education could totally be an indicator for middle class even if most people didn’t have one.
- tovej 10mo ago
  The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined. If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working. I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income. Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
  - wcfrobert 10mo ago
    There's that Jerry Yang quote: Middle class is a state of mind
  - ecshafer 10mo ago
    IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.
qcnguy 10mo ago
That's a very ideological take, especially this part: > It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse. And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people. A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always. Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  Friend, go to a community theatre production and you will find people engaged in something for which there is no economic incentive. Or learning a new language after retirement. Or playing church softball. There’s more to life than money, and there’s good in the world dollars can’t capture.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    We're talking about academia, not hobbies. Academics expect to get paid in both money and social status. As do churches and community theaters, by the way. They tend to expect donations. If nobody ever donated money they'd shut down.
nicoburns 10mo ago
> I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.
- CharlieDigital 10mo ago
  If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless? Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint. If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
  - nicoburns 10mo ago
    "if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.
    - redwall_hp 10mo ago
      Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, however, is not. It's the foundation of the scientific method. There's an obvious lack of logical rigor to jump from someone pointing that out to framing it as proving an untruth. A is true if evidence B supports it ≠ A is only true if evidence B supports it. But you can only claim A is true if B. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke around an unknown.
taylodl 10mo ago
The real issue is we've largely abandoned the public university from a funding standpoint. Now the costs of a public institution is beyond the ability for many Americans to pay. The unstable job market has led many to believe the risks outweigh the rewards.
RRRA 10mo ago
It's insane to me having to contemplate how much more of a simple cog in the machine I would be mentally, intellectually, etc. had I not been exposed to sciences for the sake of knowledge and had only been trained on the job and some day tossed out as not useful anymore... That would be the definition of alienation for me.
deleted 10mo ago
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rayiner 10mo ago

That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.

collinmcnulty 10mo ago
I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans. Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
- rayiner 10mo ago
  Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
  - monero-xmr 10mo ago
    I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
    - rayiner 10mo ago
      If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a few years.
      - eastbound 10mo ago
        The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
        potato3732842 10mo ago
        >The US was also much more unified at the time Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy" If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant. We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.
      - pjmlp 10mo ago
        The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 10mo ago
  >things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice%2Cwhiteness%2CDonald+Trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me. The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
  - seec 10mo ago
    That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school. A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail. And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.
- maxglute 10mo ago
  > in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extraction to prop up GDP flows. US economy would appear much less powerhouse if not for all the disproportionate financiailization/rent extraction from inelastic sectors (rent/education/health etc) aggregated over past 40 years over functionally comparable value goods/services.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Has anymore wealth actually been created tho? You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost. This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
    - mlinhares 10mo ago
      I haven't been in a car accident for 15 years, not even fender benders, that doesn't mean I shouldn't take insurance. As someone from a random developing nation car accidents deliver crippling debt and destroy lives there frequently because insurance is not mandatory. The developing nation blindly ignore the externalities of not having insurance (instead of spreading the cost throughout society, only a few people bear the brunt of it, usually the ones least equipped to handle it), so your example is great only if you assume its fine to continue to beat down the poor. There's a reason developed nations have developed such "red tape" and the anti-vaccine movement here in the US is finding out what happens when the red tape is removed.
- bildung 10mo ago
  > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
  - phillipcarter 10mo ago
    Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
RVuRnvbM2e 10mo ago
The reason for US economic domination starting in the 50s is the fact that society and infrastructure in the rest of the developed world had been utterly devastated by the second World War. The rate of college education is utterly irrelevant.
spankalee 10mo ago
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then. But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
- WillPostForFood 10mo ago
  US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
danans 10mo ago
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today. Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore. That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
- jswelker 10mo ago
  Community colleges are the best existing institution we have to fill the gap. They are too wedded to the university model though. Credit hours, semesters, discrete courses, administrative overhead, the whole works, minus much of the campus life dressing. Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
- bombcar 10mo ago
  Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.
  - danans 10mo ago
    I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
    - K0balt 10mo ago
nobodyandproud 10mo ago
Correlation-only is sloppy analysis. The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem. But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight. The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family. Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
- overfeed 10mo ago
  > The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
  - lurk2 10mo ago
    > when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics. Langbert notes: > The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans. Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-survey-political-leanings-liberal-conservative-moderate-centrist-harvard-yale-variation-across-school-tenure-status-demographics-20241022 https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su... > When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.” Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-report-2024/ https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep... > Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.
doctorpangloss 10mo ago
are you saying that your kids should not go to college? okay, now do you see why your statistic is meaningless, even if it is true? who answers “yes” to the first question? (hardly anyone).
- ggm 10mo ago
  A minor nit. "Should not" is on a path from "don't have to" and "can chose not to" When the fintech boom in the 80s and 90s kicked off, quants aside, many had zero tertiary education. The benefit of a university then became access to social circles, and a bit of spreadsheets. I have friends who worked in this sector, and the associated industries wiring it up and nobody cared about your degree if you weren't dining with merchant bankers. I think the WH is proving at best education is marginal value to hucksters.
  - expedition32 10mo ago
    It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true. Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.
Dylan16807 10mo ago
What specifically are you calling revisionism? I don't see anything in their post that's tied to these numbers. They said it's good. They didn't say it matches the best decades of the economy.
Swenrekcah 10mo ago
The problem is that almost everyone is now expected to get a degree which necessarily devalues the whole thing. It is now necessary to get a doctorate if you want to really signal academic prowess, but that comes with an incredibly high opportunity and personal cost. Society really needs to just accept that just over half of the population is never going to maka a good doctor, engineer, physicist, etc. and that is perfectly OK. We readily understand that very few people can become professional athletes and don’t think any less of those that can’t.
firesteelrain 10mo ago
The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to higher education and economists widely credit it with boosting productivity, innovation, and the growth of the middle class. Rising college attainment in the 1990s and 2000s coincides with globalization, offshoring, and wage stagnation, which makes this a correlation problem rather than evidence that more education causes national decline.
- dmix 10mo ago
  It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%
  - firesteelrain 10mo ago
    Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.
    - dmix 10mo ago
      Right, there was clearly much more capacity for advanced education with the rise of technology (farming advancements, medicine, electronics etc) that started before WW2 There is something to the point about needing a correction in post secondary education and making university again a specialized place rather than the catch all default generalized institutions. Where 70% of the population tries to waits 3-5yrs+ to enter the workforce in exchange for lots of debt. A debt heavily incentivized by cheap gov backed loans, subsidies, credential inflation, and very profitable immigration schemes.
zbzdrol 10mo ago
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally? The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole none are both wise and caring. I say this as a middle-aged gen-X’r. The missing ingredient is that no one fucking cares about anyone other than themselves. It’s not a problem that we need to solve by dumbing people down. I’d argue that we’re not educated enough.
- jimnotgym 10mo ago
  > You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.
- NickC25 10mo ago
  >You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. "I love the poorly educated" ~our current president.
locknitpicker 10mo ago
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kleiner The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
- rayiner 10mo ago
  The U.S. was already the richest country in the world per capita by 1880–even at the peak of the British Empire. Most of its military achievements during the war—building up the world’s largest Navy and airforce from almost nothing within a couple of years—was a product of the industrial economy that already existed before the war. America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people. And you need some of those people, but you don’t want your society to be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion. The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college_students_average_iq_has_fallen_17_points_since_1939_1006608.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.
docfath 10mo ago
> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. Correlation != causation, but let’s go the correlation route and see where it goes… China had correlation between higher-ed and economic growth, so I think you’re just trying to make an argument to support a fascist dictator who doesn’t want to be the dumbest person in the room. The decline in Christianity, rise in apathy, rise of industry in other countries, offensive wars, rise of entertainment culture, etc. are correlated also. One could also argue that the rise of uneducated conservatives was associated with U.S. decline.
sharts 10mo ago
Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though
deleted 10mo ago
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spicyusername 10mo ago
Sorry to say that I don't think the post-WWII boom had anything to do with sound economic policies, but rather the chance fact that the United States was the only industrialized nation unravaged by war and capable of capturing a major share of global economic spending because of that. So... I wouldn't look too nostalgically backwards for policy guidance when we have an entirely different set of geopolitical circumstances.
rixed 10mo ago
Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?

epicureanideal 10mo ago

Academic freedom? Where has that existed in the last 20 years?

jswelker 10mo ago

It's an interesting combo, but after working for a decade in higher ed, there is a real division and enmity between the liberal arts and sciences and the "career" programs. The latter is seen as an illegitimate degree mill. The former as a freeloader that does not pull its weight financially. It is an uneasy partnership of convenience.

sagarm 10mo ago
I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.
- jswelker 10mo ago
  It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities. Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.
collinmcnulty 10mo ago
It’s absolutely an uneasy partnership. But my goodness the benefits of having rubbed shoulders with people studying forensics, entomology, philosophy, pure math, and agriculture were enormous. If I had gone to a school composed exclusively of engineers and other careerists, how much narrower would my world have been? And bringing in ideas from other areas of study has been so powerful in both my life and my career.

mc32 10mo ago

What they crank out today suffers from grade inflation. No longer is 'C' the average grade. Kids and parents who pay over 100k for their diploma all demand above average grades. It's not as bad as presenting a diploma from a Caribbean diploma mill, but they're not what they used to be.

collinmcnulty 10mo ago
Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.
- drnick1 10mo ago
  That already exists, it's called an A+.
- Mountain_Skies 10mo ago
  American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.
- trashface 10mo ago
  Many games already have an S-tier in class/stats/builds, whatever the criteria is. Would be funny if higher ed ripped that off. Life mimicking art and all that.

hc12345 10mo ago

Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid. But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.

jswelker 10mo ago
The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.
- haritha-j 10mo ago
  Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.
  - 10mo ago

wavemode 10mo ago

It's not sustainable to sell a product that most people only buy because they were trying to buy something else (or because they're forced to for societal reasons). That sort of approach is exactly why "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost" (as the title states)! People are wising up to the truth, and now it's harming the credibility of the system as a whole.

SpicyLemonZest 10mo ago
Everything's a societal reason from some angle. We've probably tilted a bit too hard towards college as a universal path, but I think the median college-degree-required job would still tell you that they're trying to find people who value education and learning for its own sake. The best doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. are the intellectually curious ones who don't see education as a burden.
- trimethylpurine 10mo ago
  Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.
- conductr 10mo ago
  You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances. I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years. We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact. This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.

nebula8804 10mo ago

This comment would make more sense if more than ~38% of the country had a college degree. Can you really make the argument that college is truly a middle class concept if not even half of the populations has a bachelor's degree? I guess if you include community college which has really helped to serve the downtrodden get on their dream paths then I guess it makes more sense?

seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
Middle class doesn’t necessarily mean average or median class, but rather some life style bar where you aren’t struggling even if you can’t afford many luxuries. In India, for example, the middle class is small (definitely not average!) but growing. Having a college education could totally be an indicator for middle class even if most people didn’t have one.
tovej 10mo ago
The middle class is something in between the capitalist class and the working class, it's badly defined. If you're in the capital class, you're getting your income from the assets you own. If you're in the working class, you're getting your income from working. I've heard multiple definitions for a middle class, eiher one that owns some capital in the form of rental apartments or stocks, or that the middle class has a decenr amount of discretionary income. Personally I don't think the middle class is that useful of a term to make sense of the economy. I also have a feeling that people like the term middle class because it muddies the waters when it comes to understanding the relationship between capital and labor.
- wcfrobert 10mo ago
  There's that Jerry Yang quote: Middle class is a state of mind
- ecshafer 10mo ago
  IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.

qcnguy 10mo ago

That's a very ideological take, especially this part: > It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse. And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people. A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always. Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).

collinmcnulty 10mo ago
Friend, go to a community theatre production and you will find people engaged in something for which there is no economic incentive. Or learning a new language after retirement. Or playing church softball. There’s more to life than money, and there’s good in the world dollars can’t capture.
- qcnguy 10mo ago
  We're talking about academia, not hobbies. Academics expect to get paid in both money and social status. As do churches and community theaters, by the way. They tend to expect donations. If nobody ever donated money they'd shut down.

nicoburns 10mo ago

> I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares about grades and proving knowledge much more than the pursuit of knowledge.

CharlieDigital 10mo ago
If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless? Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint. If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.
- nicoburns 10mo ago
  "if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.
  - redwall_hp 10mo ago
    Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, however, is not. It's the foundation of the scientific method. There's an obvious lack of logical rigor to jump from someone pointing that out to framing it as proving an untruth. A is true if evidence B supports it ≠ A is only true if evidence B supports it. But you can only claim A is true if B. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke around an unknown.

taylodl 10mo ago

The real issue is we've largely abandoned the public university from a funding standpoint. Now the costs of a public institution is beyond the ability for many Americans to pay. The unstable job market has led many to believe the risks outweigh the rewards.

RRRA 10mo ago

It's insane to me having to contemplate how much more of a simple cog in the machine I would be mentally, intellectually, etc. had I not been exposed to sciences for the sake of knowledge and had only been trained on the job and some day tossed out as not useful anymore... That would be the definition of alienation for me.

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