Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

> 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/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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Today’s college is yesterday’s high school though

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).

> 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.

> Most of the world has severed the two

Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.

I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.

Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.

Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.

These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.

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.

Colleges used to be much more affordable even though they covered liberal arts and engineering together.

Are all colleges unaffordable? Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts? Maybe this isn't universal, maybe it's just that prestigious colleges all have strong liberal arts programs, either out of tradition or because it's required for being seen as prestigious.

Liberal arts courses arguably are still helpful for building general language and reasoning skills.

On the whole though, it does seem strange that I paid the same for a graduate level stats course and a freshman history course, even though the former taught me about five times as much.

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.

> 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).

Like a car in the United States, outside of perhaps five metro areas?

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.

I had the impression that liberal arts students were highly profitable for universities, because they had no expensive labs.

Agreed completely on this. I almost wonder if it’d be more palatable to add a grade above A, like a Japanese style “S”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teenagers do not understand the true value of things. This is not news and not restricted to the field of education. “You’ll need to get a good job someday” is one of the all-purpose lines adults use when harassing them into making better life choices.

College makes a person more capable in general, which confers long-term competitiveness during a career. That’s why parents want their kids to go to college. And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box. It works better if they are engaged and enthusiastic, of course.

I think that's the disconnect. When college was more rarified, it was populated by a mix of children of privilege and those who had the talent, ambition and desire to expand their minds. That selection bias was enough to predict future success. When the formula was boiled down to "college=success" it became a system to be gamed. Students scraping and cheating to get admission, schools offering easier degrees. The birth of diploma mills where education didn't matter and student life was non-existent. No wonder the value of college seems so diminished.

> Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...

That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.

I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.

Men and women. Women were heavily involved in the engineering work at the beginning of the industry. The industry only became male dominated in the late 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_disparity_in_computing

Steve Jobs taking Calligraphy [1] comes to mind

[1] https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc?si=339qOh2AlIr5QC2f&t=204

Not sure why the down votes. Severing health insurance from employers would be a huge win. It's just such a massive task that the efforts to address it like Obamacare aren't enough even remotely.

Or, just provide 'basic healthcare' as a human right (and service for being taxed) and make ALL plans on top of that luxury services.

Wouldn't you like to STOP the insanity of "picking" a plan every year (or more) and also end the billing nightmare by just making it all single payer (the government of the people, for the people)?

The ACA would need to be changed too, it isn't as generous tax-wise as employer based care. The portion of the premium paid by the subscriber is not automatically tax deductible - they have to itemize or meet certain self-employment restrictions. Many don't, so they are paying effectively with after tax dollars. Its one reason why the ACA rate hikes next year are so brutal.

It matters for early retirees (or these days, people forced out of job some years before they wanted to officially retire). Without self-employment income they can't deduct it, and often for similar reasons they can't itemize. They still get the standard deduction of course, but an person on an employer plan gets that + their cost of premiums, automatically.

American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:

Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."

> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".

Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.

Sure, but the doctors/medicine/hospitals/liability are not any cheaper.

So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.

I don't disagree with your major points but note that Spanish university course syllabi are determined centrally and are identical across Universities which seems incredibly bizarre to me.

You'll occasionally see people point out that requiring a college degree has all the same legal problems as requiring a hiring exam does. And those people are correct in terms of the judgments that impose our terrible precedents. They're all just as negative on degree requirements as they are on performance requirements.

But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.

The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.

> (My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)

This might have been true when the United States was mostly white, and "minority" specifically referred to the black population who was mostly descended from slaves brought to the US mainland pre-1808, or to an even small number of native Americans. Today, when the US population is significantly more ethnically diverse, and "minority" just means "anyone nonwhite, regardless of where they came from or what their family history is", there's a lot more variation in exactly how ability to afford college correlates with ethnicity.

All of this is because academia and educational institutions have a tremendous amount of power this way. They can select for ideological compliance instead of actual competence. And this is a desirable property for the rulers because they can weed out those who are likely to destabilise them if they were able to show a valuable alternate path by example.

Why spend so much money on an "education" if you could become successful by simple being competent. The tech sector was like that at first, but then came the degree requirement and the HR ladies. It was a short run and now they are very mad that some people became successful without needing to bow to the dominant ideology.

and yet ... that's not what the case you referenced says at all. Justia's own summary, from your link:

> Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.

(emphasis mine)

>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education.

Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.

The cause is laid out in your second sentence.

Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.

As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.

Ah yes, the neoliberal boogeyman.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. > Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.

Do you agree with that definition ? If so, none of what is happening in the EU is consistent with that description. If not, I'm all hears for what you think it means.

> The left has not been popular in the EU since the 70s What constitute the left has mutated and is not called as such anymore. It is now found in the "green" parties and adjacent. The hard left is actually very popular, at least as much as the right wing, but I'll grant you they are becoming less desirable because people are pushing back on the immigration the hard left is very much for that. It is incoherent because it mechanically reduce the power/earning of their supposed electorate but on the other hand it grants them dominating power in key places and they get the votes of the bourgeoisie.

Here is some data on public government spending in the EU. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r... https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-spendin...

Most of the rich countries are over 50% and approaching 60% very fast. After COVID, spending has increased at an insane rate, via debt creation. It's basically like a poor family using credit to buy an ultra expensive fancy car but I guess that's very austere to you.

It's balsy to pretend that the EU suffer from austerity when the data readily show the contrary. The only tax revisions to be found are to raise them, not the other way around.

To be clear, I'm all for the targeted raising of taxes on the boomers, who got us into this mess. I also think some of the regulations goals are laudable (notably transition to electric everything and building improvements but I disagree that regulation is the way to get there. Considering that the EU economy is basically in the dump, I'll say that the world largely agree with me.

> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.

It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.

> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.

And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.

It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.

All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.

And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.

A degree from the "right" college surely helps for certain firms? Sure, it must be a small number of top ones as most can't afford to be that choosy about their candidates.

Whether that is a sensible strategy for the firm (a candidate bias towards those who can pay the top college fees) is another question.

If I remember that right. It is not that easy to get into the state school in our state. UW engineering departments required GPA 4.0 last year. Kids who had GPA 3.9 or less had 0 chances getting into the UW engineering schools.

> Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.

A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.

Yes - for those coming from USA. Most colleges in EU are part of the US student loan program, through Netherlands appears to be dropping it

Really? Which industries wouldn't hire you if you had a non-American degree?

And is this about the content of the degree(s), or just brand name recognition?

Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job

I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.

That doesn't have prestige value. Prestige comes from scarcity and the ability to exclude the lower caste.

If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.

> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost

This isn’t socially useful.

Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?

Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.

Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).

This is part of the reason I make this point online. People need to understand that there are jobs available if you do the work to make yourself valuable, especially if you aren't demanding high compensated FAANG roles right out the gate. It's just that if you learn absolutely nothing and will be hired to do shit work for a year or two until you become baseline competent and will just leave as soon as you can pass FAANG interviews, companies would rather just pay people in developing countries like India or Colombia. They'll do bad work and, in the case that they do turn out to be great, leave to make more money. But at least they cost 5x less (the US system of employer covered healthcase isn't helping our workers' competitiveness in this either!)

> knock out core credits in community college

The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.

> The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up

> gen X / boomer

Those 2 generations aren't even remotely close in terms of shared experience of what high school diploma was like when they grew up.

>Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.

I'll have to push back on this. I'll give NJ as an example but other states have similar systems. In NJ If you are in the top 15% of your graduating school you are covered for full tuition provided for the first two years at community college. You are also given a guaranteed spot at whatever public college/program you want. (EDIT: I am not sure if this is still the case im trying to sift through the documentation but now I think it may also require minimum GPA in CC) Imagine getting that university degree and starting your professional career with potentially 0 debt.

Furthermore a variation of this program extends to families making less than 65k. If you meet that criteria. The community college degree is 0$. From there you are given a course schedule that if you follow will transfer 1:1 to a university and if you do well academically there you can be eligible for reduced or waived tuition at the public college of your choosing. This system helps people who did poorly in high school or just didnt make the cut aid wise get a second chance at tuition free college.

If you make more than 65k, you still get reduced tuition on some sliding scale. And again excellent grades translates to more savings.

At least for NJ, Community college really sets many people up for an excellent start in their career by not having any college debt.

The thing is, prestige and cost do not go hand in hand. The most expensive schools are not the most prestigious. I think Vanderbilt was the first school to hit the ignominious milestone of $100,000/yr, and they're not Ivy League, Ivy+, or perhaps even Ivy++ (if such a classification existed).

> average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely

This is far from true when you consider the selection bias of who goes to college, and the sheepskin effect.

Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.

You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.

> like Florida

If Florida is "backwater", then so is most of the rest of the country outside of a handful of overpriced cities where earning 80k is required to be able to afford a room in an apartment - not the whole apartment, and certainly not buying one.

No, if anything the article has a copyedit error in saying twice in one sentence that the doubling is after inflation-adjustment.

> While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995.

Yeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.

There was a user here a few months ago trying to promote his startup. He was being somewhat obnoxious when people offered criticism so I looked him up and found he was some 21 year old kid. Profile read:

> Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders.

> Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council.

> Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF.

The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.

I didn’t take a single unnecessary course.

The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).

Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".

Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".

I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.

That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.

That assumes there are a large number of jobs that require no advanced education. Short of construction, those jobs flew overseas decades ago.

All this states is expensive degrees aren't worth it, not paid for education.

> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Told by who?

What's wonderful about comprehensive universities is that there's a program that can excite the interest of almost every personality.

And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.

If we’re talking about social costs and social benefits then it does matter. Different countries can have wildly different costs for delivering the same education, an education whose value to society (or lack thereof) needs to be taken into account.

Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.

> The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.

That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.

> "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions.

Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.

> Apologies if English isn't your first language.

I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.

TANSTAAFL

> It means "at no cost to the student".

and GP's whole point was that it is not at no cost to the student.

Apologies if reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.

…but there is cost to the student or their family. The difference being that paying for it or not is not an option. You can’t just say “I won’t go to uni, so I won’t pay for it”

Is it a failure of the process? The selection process is to pick people who willing to pay, not who can solve equations.

Sorry, typo. I meant 25% couldn't answer it.

Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?

California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.

That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.

1 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/

The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).

Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.

Most are overpaying in taxes for what they are getting.

Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.

San Francisco USD’s lottery system has entered the chat

I can’t do a standing backflip. This is a true statement and contributes the same amount to a discussion about higher education in the US as “I know a kid that can do algebra”

what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.

It's due to your username; they think you're a troll.

It may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair.

There's lot of anecdotal chatter and also mainstream media coverage on this.. It's a genuine concern.

But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all.

The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.

> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.

Sincere question: Why were you not able to just think "Oh, ok, some people do this and feel this way." and then just move on? I'm not sure why these particular things needed to be discussed.

> One of our guest speakers was a man with autogynephilia—a man who derives sexual pleasure from dressing like a woman.

> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.

Now I definitely agree with the other poster that this sounds made up, or at the very least you are significantly embellishing the story in such a way to completely ruin your own credibility.

https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/docs/Undergraduate/UGHandbook_20...

According to the University of Utah Computer Science Undergraduate Student Handbook 2014-2015, "Students must take two intellectual explorations courses in each: fine arts (FF), humanities (HF), and social sciences (BF). Two of these six courses must be upper division ­ – one should meet the diversity (DV) requirement and one should meet the international (IR) requirement" and "The diversity (DV) requirement can be satisfied by taking a course from an approved list as part of the intellectual explorations courses." So, there was only one required diversity course, from a list of courses, meaning that gender studies was not specifically mandated. If you took gender studies to satisfy the diversity requirement, it was because you chose gender studies, which seems like an odd choice, given your beliefs. In any case, you would not have to take multiple diversity courses.

> I still have 8 classes left. Nothing happened to my career.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. As a result of dropping out, do you not have a career in computing? Alternatively, did dropping out without getting a computer science degree not harm your career at all, and if it didn't, then why were you spending time and money ("I refused to spend another dollar of my hard-earned money") to get a degree?

In a later comment, you say:

> this was the beginning of why I personally no longer thought a college degree was worth the cost.

> sitting through courses where I was not allowed to openly debate the ideas being presented to me.

I'm confused here. For you, is the monetary value of a college degree to openly debate ideas in class? And if so, why did you major in computer science, as opposed to philosophy, for example, which is known for open debate of ideas in class, unlike computer science?

> My instructor and some students went scorched earth on me

Scorched earth is a metaphor. It's not in this case an accurate and informative description of reality. I suspect you just mean that you got criticized, which is exactly what you asked for: an open debate of ideas. The use of hyperbolic phrases like "castigated" and "scorched earth" does not make your comments plausible.

I don’t understand this thing you do in the US of forcing you to do completely unrelated courses. You want to study computers and they put you through liberal arts or gender studies bullshit that is basically worthless. Why?

No. I had one that had something to do with anthropology though.

Teaching is a deliberate act, and it cannot be replaced by a Google AI summary.

That’s kind of my point. Everyone wants to narrowly focus on what will bring them the most value as quickly as possible. Being educated in a wide array of subjects doesn’t seem useful at first, but it actually makes you a better communicator, and citizen.

Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.

Agreed. Going to college for the social experience and for generally learning about the world is effectively a luxury good now. For people who just want a path to stable employment, the ROI on college no longer makes sense at all.

Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.

> Now do the tech industry

Do you have numbers? If you don’t, the appropriate baseline is population.