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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#301

Post by tptacek »

hajile wrote: post #142
rayiner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because it gives guilds the power to control the pipeline of skilled labor and exclude new entrants to limit supply. Guilds are generally run by their members, and the existing members are much more likely to be white and native born than potential new entrants. Their management structure also makes it more likely that prejudices will be acted upon. When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they…

A federal government can dictate what it thinks morality should be, but in practice cannot enforce morality in a free country. Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous…

Guilds and unions are not the same thing.

No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#302

Post by [deleted] »

mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

[deleted]

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#303

Post by randomdata »

non-entity wrote: post #89
technothrasher wrote: post #10

The four years I spent at my university were four of the best years of my life. I grew academically, socially, and career-wise in ways I just never would have without going to school. However, I have plenty of friends that never went to any higher education than high school, or who dropped out of college early on, and it's not like they're unsuccessful or maladjusted. It seems pretty clear that different paths work f…

Yeah, as much as I hate the university as an institution, they're still necessary for a large amount of people (in practice) These threads tend to be filled with comments that assume everyone is a developer and / or should be. Unfortunately many, if not most high paying jobs will still require higher education, particularly the stereotypically well paying ones. You aren't going to become a doctor, engineer (non softw…

> Unfortunately many, if not most high paying jobs will still require higher education, particularly the stereotypically well paying ones.

Not just any higher education, though, but specific professional degrees that grant access to supply managed markets. That part seems to be often missed when this topic comes up.

I recall a Gallup study into the top 1% finding that something like 70% of the top 1% have a professional degrees (doctors, lawyers, etc.). The remaining portion was comprised of more people with high school or less than those with only a bachelor degree, suggesting that a bachelor degree alone does nothing to improve your prospects. Which goes against the common thinking.

But is also echoed in the general economy. With the rise of post-secondary attainment, incomes have held stagnant. If there was a financial advantage gained though higher education itself, not through supply management, incomes would be rising.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#304

Post by dqv »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #288

I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable. (I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the de…

I dropped out of college precisely because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do.

Did you do full-time college and full-time job when you returned? How was balancing that with all the other life responsibilities?

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#305

Post by lozaning »

simplify wrote: post #290
Auracle wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it could lead to plenty of people making the smart decision to file for bankruptcy even when they have a good degree. Bankruptcy at 22 isn’t that big of a deal, generally. I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.

Bankruptcy negatively affects your credit score by a large amount, so it's not exactly an easy decision.

It would be a very easy decision I think. Can you rebuild your credit in less time than it would take you to pay off your loans?

If you're still going to be paying your loan off in 7 years, bankruptcy would be an easy choice.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#306

Post by supernova87a »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #288

I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable. (I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the de…

Wait, if you're 55 now, you grew up in basically the golden age of US growth and the easy value of a college degree at relatively cheap tuition. And you had friends back then who were saddled with college debt that led to dead end jobs?

The situation, is way, way worse now. Orders of magnitude worse.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#307

Post by umvi »

mLuby wrote: post #300
umvi wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone in the USA actually starving? That's a common thing brought up, but calories are so cheap in the US that most poor people are actually morbidly obese, not starving. Even if you were starving, you could easily subsist panhandling at some traffic intersection. How long does it take to panhandle $10? An hour or two? And with that you could buy a 15 pound bag of rice which is like a months' worth of carbs. Star…

Don't forget: - the rice cooker - electricity to cook the rice - potable water for the rice - storage containers for the leftover rice - refrigeration or other means of preserving the prepared food - a secure place to store your month's food supply from other hungry people and/or cleaners - mental health while you eat the same plain rice with bare your hands for a month and society judges you for "not pulling yoursel…

There's a big difference between "starvation" and "hunger"/"food insecurity".

You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).

I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.

Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#308

Post by bananaface »

oneplane wrote: post #184
nu_throwaway wrote: post #182

this sort of reads as self re-assurement for his son's path; the author is a Harvard professor and I assume daily interaction in academia all revolves around how great and virtuous higher ed is yet he's bucked the trend. perhaps if he truly feels that way he could leave academia and cease perpetuating the myth? imo calling it an "investment" is part of the problem. its a pure sunk cost and not an asset.

People call it an investment because they think: I put something in it with the goal of getting more out of it in total. They don't see it as finance terminology and the concept of the word investment in the context of others like 'sunk cost' and 'asset' holds very little specific meaning in that case. Ironically that is a 'problem' you can 'fix' by putting people in college and teaching them basic accounting.

You'd fix it by banning non-dischargeable loans (and potentially making Universities guarantee the loans so they're actually responsible for the candidates they shit out without prospects).

It's incredibly predatory to lure people who by definition don't know that much about the world yet (let alone finance) to take on six figures of debt for something that the investors know in a lot of cases won't pay for itself. It's usury. As an outsider, the fact the US allows it reeks of political corruption.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#309

Post by robotresearcher »

mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

Imagine we collected the best material in written, bound volumes. And nearly every city had a large collection you could borrow from for free.

We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already.

You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#310

Post by DoreenMichele »

dqv wrote: post #304
DoreenMichele wrote: post #288

I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable. (I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the de…

I dropped out of college precisely because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. Did you do full-time college and full-time job when you returned? How was balancing that with all the other life responsibilities?

I went to school part-time and intermittently while very ill and homeschooling my special-needs sons. I also completed a couple of different certificate programs with a compressed scheduled, one in a Summer Camp format where you completed a year-long certificate program in two months, and the other was a month of going to school eight hours a day on my employer's dime when I got a corporate job.

I wrapped up an Associate's with two online classes and testing out of some other things. I then enrolled in an online bachelor's, which was never completed because divorce and a serious, lengthy medical crisis got in the way. I then did GIS school one summer and got a corporate job and they put me through a certificate program and additional training for my entry-level job.

You can look into testing out of some things. This is cheaper and less of a time commitment. You can do self study to help prepare for such tests.

You may be able to get some credits for other things. There are books on how to try to do this. If you have military experience, most American colleges will automatically credit you for some of your military training and schools (like you will generally be exempt from taking any phys ed classes).

Online classes can also help make things work. I did sometimes take classes in person and the commute to class was a huge and burdensome time commitment. When I took classes online, there was no commute and that time went into studying instead.

If you do take classes in person, you can reduce the time burden by choosing a compressed schedule. Sometimes the same class is offered on either a schedule of three one hour classes a week or two 90 minute meetings a week. The class with two 90 minute meetings will save you commute time to the college, which can be substantial. (For me, the college in question was like 30 or 45 minutes away, even though it was in the same city I was in. This added up to an hour to 90 minutes saved per week to go with the compressed scheduled.)

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