These articles always land all over the place because the reality is that “college” is a pretty wide term covering everything from a CS degree at MIT (worth millions) to a communications degree from Beaver College (probably not worth much at all).
College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
161–170 of 437 posts
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#162I 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…
But if you are a child of parents who can finance your college? Absolutely. No question. This is essentially a way to enforce Aristocracy.
Are you sure? $100k in college vs. $100k in S&P 500 ..I think the it's about the same. The grad starts with a -100k deficit (i'm assuming graduate school is included). The Aristocracy perpetuates itself through inheritance. I don't think most college grads, even with the wage premium, feel like aristocrats.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#163School is a waste of time and resources for the talented these days. You can learn anything you want online by the best people. It's becoming training for state-run communism. No choice, only negative reward signals, march at the same speed as the average. Of course if we tell people the truth - your outcome can essentially be predicted by measuring IQ, which stabilizes around age 7. SAT score is essentially a makesh…
Failed out of engineering= they didnt care I agree that most education should be learned on the job, but college is a filter to keep the lazy out of jobs that require the dedicated. Engineering was insane because they wanted people that would drop what they are doing to go to mexico with 7 hours notice. The dude that dropped out of engineering school is planning on fishing this weekend, hes not going anywhere his bos…
> Failed out of engineering= they didnt care
I don't even know how to respond to this... my friends didn't fail out from a lack of effort. You also don't know this but all of my old friends are Mexican - so you are implicitly saying the reason they didn't succeed is because they are lazy Mexicans. I don't think you intended to take this stance.
You likely got tricked with everyone else into believing in social constructionist view that colleges push, everyone is the same unless you can see the differences. Of course they push this because it removes all liability from them for vetting students, and it places blame on failure to the students.
Also I did graduate college and found only the math and advanced CS classes useful(3rd year +).
Source, to show that these patterns are more than anecdotal: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coj.asp
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#164News flash, it hasn't been worth it for at least 15 years. That is when I graduated high-school. I toured some colleges, submitted my FASFA, and ran the numbers. My family was lower middle class. My grades were above average but not top of my class. I had two options: take out loans for college and go into immense debt at age 18 or learn a marketable skill and go to work. I was already self-learning how to code durin…
They may have been wrong in your case, but unless something has changed very recently the numbers still tilt in favor of better long-term results on average for people with college degrees. I know plenty of successful people without degrees but at a macro scale it's not good advice.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
>every year of college costs 1 year of salary This is point-blank wrong, unless you're only talking about elite private schools. Most state schools cost around 1-1.5 years of full-time salary, discounting room and board since you have to pay for somewhere to live independently of if you attend university. If your goal is to simply get a degree, you can do it for less than $50k (which is definitely still off compared…
You're missing opportunity cost. If you're in school full-time, you're not working full-time. That costs the salary you're not making and the experience you're not getting, on top of what you pay for school plus interest (because unless your parents are rich or you're That Counterexample, you're borrowing).
In return, you go to school, which one hopes is worth the cost over the course of the rest of your life, however you measure it (but here, mostly in currency). Which brings us back to this discussion.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
People hate when I talk about working fulltime in the factory on the midnight shift and going to school fulltime. I didnt get 'the college experience'. But I didnt have any college debt, I became a hardened adult that didnt cry when plant people got pissed. I dont complain. If something needs to get done, I do it. Graduated in 3 years with my chem engineering degree at age 21. People will always complain about someth…
Not saying it's true for you, but everyone I knew at college that was working full-time was in my opinion getting far less out of college than they would have. You need time to ponder, to explore, to be curious. Having to grind insane hours just to get in the game might be workable for the very dedicated and tough, but it's certainly not an optimal experience, and something we should strive to make not necessary.
Most people are at college to get a job with a good paycheck after, not to learn.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is probably a good thing, since it will slowly beat into the minds of upper-levels at corps and recruiters that a College Degree shouldn't be the minimum bar applicants need to reach, and maybe some of these companies will start removing the "has degree" band reject filter.
Yes, my HS counselor, in speeches to students at assemblies (c.1999), was constantly saying "It doesn't matter which college you go to, but you absolutely must get a degree."
Same here, they even went so far as to say it didn’t even matter what you studied!
That is why you should never take career advice from someone who ended up as a careers adviser....
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#168Earlier 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.
Wall Street greed did this! The financiers got their hooks into higher education. I'm friends with a person who is the head of financial aid at a major Mid-Atlantic university. She saw it all go down during the Bill Clinton years.
It was all sold as helping people but all they did was help themselves. A lot of university administrators are guilty, too. There were likely kickbacks and other illegal schemes taking place.
Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#169Re: College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
#170I 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…
Make the college take a 10% stake in any loan taken out to attend that school. The colleges would be a lot more selective about who they let in (hint: not everyone) and what their students' majors were.