Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

While we’re eliminating non-revenue sports teams can we also drop theater groups, singing groups and school newspapers.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.

This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.

There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it's a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they're buying a ticket to a better life is far more vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan.

All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

I think the number of people graduating with a collage degree significantly outstrips the demand for collage degrees. Otherwise you would not see people with collage degrees working retail etc.

Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting related majors. Humanities majors who moved (to Washington DC, New York, to a lesser extent San Francisco or Los Angeles) fared better.

I agree that "STEM" alone won't get you a good job, and some of the bio majors were not doing a whole lot better than the humanities majors. But overall, STEM was a vastly better place to be, especially the more "numeric" fields - by that, I mean the various majors that require the common two year sequence of math from calculus through linear algebra and differential equations as a prerequisite to whatever upper division specialization happens. Even there, some are better than others in terms of jobs, but they all fared vastly better.

Humanities majors from very elite schools tend to weather a recession ok, but otherwise, I think that one advantage to being a STEM major (with the caveat I described above) is that you're less likely to be permanently knocked out of the game by a bad stretch, especially in the beginning. There's a real risk to getting sidelined, and I worry about the young people graduating right now. For instance, my employer has done a hiring moratorium for a year, and there may be layoffs. This, especially if it goes on for a few years, is unusually devastating to the long term career prospects of people just starting out.

My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. If you graduate in better times, you lock in a few good career building years. You may stagnate, you may even be unemployed for long enough that it knocks you off the path for a bit, but you have something to build on. If you graduate when nobody is hiring, and you float around for a few years, by the time things pick up, employers are either hiring the people who have some experience, or going back to recent grads for entry level hiring. That definitely happened to a lot of people I know who graduated in the early 90s in SoCal.

I suspect that humanities majors from very elite colleges, as well as STEM majors in very in demand fields from a broader range of colleges, are less likely to be locked out in a bad market, and more likely to be recruited back in when things improve. This is a bit of a guess, though I think it is supported by some research.

"Things that can't continue forever will stop."

Education wasn't on a sustainable course anyway (no pun intended). They couldn't keep increasing costs, increasing numbers of students, living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance, and growing the size and cost of the administration. I think that was getting close to the breaking point, even without Covid.