10 ms·

I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the

I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.

rootusrootus 6mo ago
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market. E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
- mcmcmc 6mo ago
  I'd interpret that as 11% of CS grads are finding appropriate jobs (not underemployment) within a set amount of time after graduation. That data from the fed includes all people aged 22-27 with a bachelor's degree. Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    That's the way I interpreted it, too. A CS grad working at Home Depot stocking shelves or an accounting grad working at Starbucks would not count toward unemployment figures, but it's probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate. Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
    - rootusrootus 6mo ago
      > probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate Agreed, but wouldn't that be captured as 'under employment'? The stats are there for that, too, seems to be close to 20%.
      - ryandrake 6mo ago
        Yea, I'd call that underemployed. Does that mean 80% of recent college grads are employed in their area of study? I would be shocked if that were true.
        UncleMeat 6mo ago
        It means that they are employed in a position that requires a college degree.
        mcmcmc 6mo ago
        Underemployment in the Fed’s data is defined as working any job where at least 50% of people in the job field say you don’t need a college degree. So 80% of recent grads are working in jobs where the perception is you need a degree. Which with the insane requirements for entry level jobs could still be underemployment from a practical perspective
- computably 6mo ago
  The census data you linked lists unemployment and underemployment for graduates aged 22-27. Assuming nontraditional graduates are a relatively small minority, that's a 5 year window after graduation. I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
- Ancalagon 6mo ago
  defunding education systems strikes again
curuinor 6mo ago
let's see the site, if we can't have a primary source
bix6 6mo ago
Quick search shows around 6% unemployment for CS grads. Where is your number from? That is massively different.
- floxy 6mo ago
  Anyone have the stats for how the enrollment trends have been for CS programs at universities? Has there been a noticeable drop-off, potentially due to concerns of AI reducing/eliminating entry-level/junior roles? I suppose there would be some lag, since if you've been planning most of your high school career to get a CS degree, there is inertia in changing majors and applying to different universities. And now that we're mid-April, I'd even think the data for the incoming freshman would be pretty close at a 90% confidence level for the upcoming 2026/2027 academic year.
  - clusterhacks 6mo ago
    Check out the Taulbee survey results: "In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease." But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025: "U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%" https://datavisualization.cra.org/TaulbeeSurvey/CRA_Taulbee_Survey_Report_2024.html#Bachelor%E2%80%99s_Program_Production_and_Enrollments
linkregister 6mo ago
Internet universities have been available for several decades; correspondence degrees for almost a century. Sure, credentialing is a large part of students' choices to attend in-person. Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is because most people learn best in-person, with personal interaction. I would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves. 1. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
- dylan604 6mo ago
  > Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is the parties, the co-eds, and the start of life from outside the direct supervision of parental units. Let's be honest, all of this education stuff is secondary to that.
  - linkregister 6mo ago
    This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by watching 1980s college movies, not someone who looked at data. Community colleges, vocational schools, and commuter students represent a large proportion of college students, and are removed from the Animal House experience. The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life. One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
    - dylan604 6mo ago
      This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by not having an honest conversation about the subject. It is entirely possible that one can attend classes while attending various parties on the weekend or even various events at night after classes. Your knee jerk reaction to my comment that everything is going to be Animal House, Porky's, or Revenge of the Nerds level of shenanigans says more about you.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate. There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago
  Jee I wish OP would have linked the source instead of just… alluding to it and promising that it’s reliable. “… a site I read…” Lol
- dmoy 6mo ago
  In 2024 is 74%, not 11% https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... That is, 7% are unemployed, and 19% aren't able to find comp sci jobs. I suspect it's worse now, but probably not 11%?
- Dunsinagb 6mo ago
  [dead]
heathrow83829 6mo ago
Yup. I've also seen a number like that mentioned by the Moonshots podcast by peter diamantis.. they showed that quarter by quarter the placement rate for CS grads had declined every querter for the last 3 years from 93% at 91K per year down to 19% at about 65k. it was one of their last podcasts from about a week ago.
jjtheblunt 6mo ago
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities and equipment. One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today. This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Ne... and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms. I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do. For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.
traderj0e 6mo ago
I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this. Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay. I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.
dylan604 6mo ago
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that. Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share
- Spooky23 6mo ago
  Well yeah, trades suck ass. There are alot of dudes in cushy well paid office gigs extolling the virtues of trade work. It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    And a bunch of tech peeps are overweight physically out of shape with other health effects as bad as what you're saying about trades. Humans get old. I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
    - Spooky23 6mo ago
irishcoffee 6mo ago
I said this a week ago, and it swung in votes like crazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525 “ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free. Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused. I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book. Magical times.”
jltsiren 6mo ago
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong. In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful. The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago: > There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed... Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas. College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model. We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  Waterloo University sort of nails the balance with their focus on constant, paid internships.
- bashtoni 6mo ago
  Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM. A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
    Lots of things benefit society and don't cost $40k per year per person in subsidies - mainly to the upper middle class.
    - lux-lux-lux 6mo ago
      Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees, both of which are considerably more expensive. Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
      - triceratops 6mo ago
        Then at the very least college debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy the way people can walk away from their mortgage.
jaredklewis 6mo ago
> I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years What's the secondary source then?
gottorf 6mo ago
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. This is the only real answer.
btreecat 6mo ago
I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists. IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago." CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos. Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend. Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.
skizm 6mo ago
If college is considered a glorified high school diploma, then not having one is like not having a high school diploma.
MiguelX413 6mo ago
> CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.

rootusrootus 6mo ago

> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market. E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

mcmcmc 6mo ago
I'd interpret that as 11% of CS grads are finding appropriate jobs (not underemployment) within a set amount of time after graduation. That data from the fed includes all people aged 22-27 with a bachelor's degree. Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  That's the way I interpreted it, too. A CS grad working at Home Depot stocking shelves or an accounting grad working at Starbucks would not count toward unemployment figures, but it's probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate. Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
  - rootusrootus 6mo ago
    > probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate Agreed, but wouldn't that be captured as 'under employment'? The stats are there for that, too, seems to be close to 20%.
    - ryandrake 6mo ago
      Yea, I'd call that underemployed. Does that mean 80% of recent college grads are employed in their area of study? I would be shocked if that were true.
      - UncleMeat 6mo ago
        It means that they are employed in a position that requires a college degree.
      - mcmcmc 6mo ago
        Underemployment in the Fed’s data is defined as working any job where at least 50% of people in the job field say you don’t need a college degree. So 80% of recent grads are working in jobs where the perception is you need a degree. Which with the insane requirements for entry level jobs could still be underemployment from a practical perspective
computably 6mo ago
The census data you linked lists unemployment and underemployment for graduates aged 22-27. Assuming nontraditional graduates are a relatively small minority, that's a 5 year window after graduation. I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
Ancalagon 6mo ago
defunding education systems strikes again

curuinor 6mo ago

let's see the site, if we can't have a primary source

bix6 6mo ago

Quick search shows around 6% unemployment for CS grads. Where is your number from? That is massively different.

floxy 6mo ago
Anyone have the stats for how the enrollment trends have been for CS programs at universities? Has there been a noticeable drop-off, potentially due to concerns of AI reducing/eliminating entry-level/junior roles? I suppose there would be some lag, since if you've been planning most of your high school career to get a CS degree, there is inertia in changing majors and applying to different universities. And now that we're mid-April, I'd even think the data for the incoming freshman would be pretty close at a 90% confidence level for the upcoming 2026/2027 academic year.
- clusterhacks 6mo ago
  Check out the Taulbee survey results: "In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease." But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025: "U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%" https://datavisualization.cra.org/TaulbeeSurvey/CRA_Taulbee_Survey_Report_2024.html#Bachelor%E2%80%99s_Program_Production_and_Enrollments

linkregister 6mo ago

Internet universities have been available for several decades; correspondence degrees for almost a century. Sure, credentialing is a large part of students' choices to attend in-person. Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is because most people learn best in-person, with personal interaction. I would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves. 1. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

dylan604 6mo ago
> Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is the parties, the co-eds, and the start of life from outside the direct supervision of parental units. Let's be honest, all of this education stuff is secondary to that.
- linkregister 6mo ago
  This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by watching 1980s college movies, not someone who looked at data. Community colleges, vocational schools, and commuter students represent a large proportion of college students, and are removed from the Animal House experience. The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life. One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by not having an honest conversation about the subject. It is entirely possible that one can attend classes while attending various parties on the weekend or even various events at night after classes. Your knee jerk reaction to my comment that everything is going to be Animal House, Porky's, or Revenge of the Nerds level of shenanigans says more about you.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate. There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.

Gagarin1917 6mo ago
Jee I wish OP would have linked the source instead of just… alluding to it and promising that it’s reliable. “… a site I read…” Lol
dmoy 6mo ago
In 2024 is 74%, not 11% https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... That is, 7% are unemployed, and 19% aren't able to find comp sci jobs. I suspect it's worse now, but probably not 11%?
Dunsinagb 6mo ago
[dead]

heathrow83829 6mo ago

Yup. I've also seen a number like that mentioned by the Moonshots podcast by peter diamantis.. they showed that quarter by quarter the placement rate for CS grads had declined every querter for the last 3 years from 93% at 91K per year down to 19% at about 65k. it was one of their last podcasts from about a week ago.

jjtheblunt 6mo ago

I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities and equipment. One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today. This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Network#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Ne... and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms. I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do. For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.

traderj0e 6mo ago

I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this. Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay. I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.

dylan604 6mo ago

> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that. Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share

Spooky23 6mo ago
Well yeah, trades suck ass. There are alot of dudes in cushy well paid office gigs extolling the virtues of trade work. It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  And a bunch of tech peeps are overweight physically out of shape with other health effects as bad as what you're saying about trades. Humans get old. I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
  - Spooky23 6mo ago

irishcoffee 6mo ago

I said this a week ago, and it swung in votes like crazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525 “ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free. Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused. I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book. Magical times.”

jltsiren 6mo ago

The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong. In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful. The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago: > There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed... Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago

The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas. College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model. We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
Waterloo University sort of nails the balance with their focus on constant, paid internships.
bashtoni 6mo ago
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM. A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
  Lots of things benefit society and don't cost $40k per year per person in subsidies - mainly to the upper middle class.
  - lux-lux-lux 6mo ago
    Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees, both of which are considerably more expensive. Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
    - triceratops 6mo ago
      Then at the very least college debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy the way people can walk away from their mortgage.

jaredklewis 6mo ago

> I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years What's the secondary source then?

gottorf 6mo ago

> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. This is the only real answer.

btreecat 6mo ago

I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists. IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago." CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos. Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend. Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.

skizm 6mo ago

If college is considered a glorified high school diploma, then not having one is like not having a high school diploma.

MiguelX413 6mo ago

> CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.