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College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
41–50 of 437 posts
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#42Big surprise: people born rich will have more money no matter if they have college degree or not.
What the article doesn't say is that all other things being equal it is still worth it to have college education. I don't think that the right way to motivate poor people is to tell them that even with degree they might be worse off than the rich. Having a degree will be better for them than not having it. Learning always pays off - be it in college or not.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#43The issue isn't that college is pointless, it's that tuition is too high and wages too low. You should support politicians with a plan to counter this trend. Education is important. Raising the overall level of education in this country should be a much larger goal that it seems to be.
Agree - I think we should consider a well educated base of voters, workers, and neighbors as critical infrastucture along with roads and internet. I think some decisions lately have highlighted an open hostility towards science, education, and by implication, democracy. This needs to be reversed.
Well educated voters are the enemy of political parties that thrive on soundbites and fear.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#44A lot of these problems would go away if we made student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy.
We've created a system that reaps huge profits in encouraging people to go to school, regardless if that's the right place for them.
If there's no counterweight to that profit motive, things will not change.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Raising the overall level of education in this country should be a much larger goal that it seems to be. On one level, I totally agree. At the same time, well-meaning attempts to make college loans available to everyone for everything seem to have massively bloated the cost of education to a crippling degree. I think the key is in the how of the approach.
That is the problem with politics: the unintended effects are always an issue. Of course everything else has this issue as well. The only difference is most of us start small, and if it works we expand. You can't do that easily for national programs.
Not in America, at least. Many European countries have government-paid, top-tier public education for free to the students.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#46The NYTimes republishes a variant of this articles almost every month https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+college+wor... The usual answer is "it depends"
it's already a shame that the answer isn't 100% yes, 100% of the time. back in the 70s, tuition was payable with a summer job and job prospects were decent enough despite geopolitical and economic headwinds these days, the same problems plague the job market, but every year of college costs 1 year of salary, unless you qualify for stackable forms of financial aid
If the answer was 100% yes, not enough people would be going to college.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#47Every modern society needs it's signaling mechanic, otherwise it becomes virtually impossible for people to want to take risks, eliminating all ladder access for the underprivileged.
Signals only work if they're hard to fake. The expense of a college degree in both time and dollars perversely increases its utility as a signal.
Of course, the price of a degree can only go so high before before people are unwilling to pay it. But the natural tendency will not be for the price to come back down, but rather for new, more accessible educational options to show up with lower signaling values. It already happened before with the difference between ivy league schools vs the rest and public vs. private.
Society will get even more stratified, with ever finer class distinctions becoming an indelible part of your pedigree. Technology will make it ever easier to buck the trend and become entrepreneurial, but even that will slowly get folded into the system. We see this with how craft brewing ended up getting rolled into the existing system, preserving the lion's share of the profits for the big bottlers.
Ever-decreasing social mobility is the price we pay for advancement.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#48I assert the expense of college is an awful burden to put on someone who must finance most of it through debt. It's a gamble. You can improve your odds of a happy outcome in that gamble by looking at the Student Loan Default Rate for any given major at any given college, and picking the best program for you (with the lowest default rate possible.) But if you are a child of parents who can finance your college? Absolu…
Student loan interest rates should be tied to the major. Engineering major? $0 down, 3.5% interest rate. Art History major? 25% down, 15% interest rate.
Sounds like a recipe for an astronomical default rate.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on how you spend that time. Studing hard pays off, slacking off - not. This should be a common knowledge. It more or less boils down to this and not status or race...
This is true for everything. People shouldnt blog, unless they are going to do hard work making the content useful. People shouldnt be a contractor, unless they have fantastic skills in a sector. If you are going to work hard and think hard, you will have success in nearly any market. If you copypasted the example android Hello World app, you arent going to succeed in the programming market.
Most people blog to have a blog and don't realize their insights aren't useful. So you're advice is not useful since telling dumb people not to do dumb things is a waste of time, they're too dumb to know what they're doing is a waste of time or doesn't have any useful insights. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, you being so smart and all.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#50Outside of work, I know a number of folks with degrees from Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara. These folks are not in tech. They love to bust on San Jose State University like its the worst thing ever.
At work, in tech, I know a number of folks with degrees from San Jose State University. They are hard working and successful millionaires.
The folks in the first group would LITERALLY DIE if their kids went to San Jose State University.
It makes me sad/angry for them that they feel there is NO OPTION other than to get their kids into Stanford/Berkeley/Santa Clara at all costs.