College has been oversold

I don't understand, the graph that you linked too appears to demonstrate exactly the same effect that the OP graph is. Could you explain what was cherry picked?

It's supply and demand. The output from college isn't matching the needs of those hiring. There aren't enough qualified programmers, math types, etc. This isn't true for many other majors, yet our colleges output far more of these other majors.

I agree and disagree.

I spent a few years at a college before going to a university, and the (average) quality of teaching was actually higher at the college, for half the tuition. So insofar as post-secondary is about the stuff you learn in class, college is awesome. And I used to recommend it highly to any high-school-student who would listen.

However, there are some other benefits that are in short supply at colleges. Your peers will, on average, be less intelligent and less dedicated. And even if your peers are worth cultivating, you won't be living dorms, which means less parties (could be a pro or a con), but also means less close bonding with those same peers. Your instructors will not have openings in their labs where you can work for slave wages during the summer, getting five times as much real education as you got the preceding 8 months.

And ALSO, "cut the price in half" is completely disingenuous. Tuition is a fraction of the total cost of school: there's fees and books, of course. But more importantly, there's opportunity cost, usually represented by some kind of unskilled pay, perhaps $20k/year. In Vancouver in the early 2000s, college will run you roughly $250/course, and university $500/course. That sounds like half the price, until your calculation includes that $20k/year in lost salary (plus $1k-$2k in fees and supplies). Suddenly it's a $26k vs $22k, which is no savings worth talking about.

There's too many variables for people to be crunching numbers like this... while I went through university I lived at home and worked at jobs that paid $17/hour minimum. My total take home would probably be comparable to that of a person making less but paying for room and board. I say this with the assumption that those who skipped post-secondary education in favor of a job moved out of their homes almost immediately.

So where are those types of values in the calculations?

Now that I've graduated my starting job is ~$60k with a $20k annual raise once I've been in this position for a little over three years. There's not one friend that started work directly out of school that I can say that for.

Not to mention my degree allows me to venture to the upper ends of this company where education is a requirement while they'll plateau in seniority because of that.

Again, way too many variables and gray areas for us to do a number to number comparison because no two situations are identical and the idea of "average" or "typical" probably only makes up a small percentage of personae anyway.

> It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned.

Obviously, parents and pre-college education are important (though if they're doing their jobs well, I wouldn't refer to what they're doing as "indoctrination"). But why should education in cognitive, moral, aesthetic, political, etc. skills end with high school graduation? Your second sentence here underscores this point: today's 18-year olds are not fully-formed citizens, ready to become "tomorrow's leaders" without further development.

> What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.

Hunger and disease are hard problems, yes. And of course, having people with technical training is required for solving them, and for solving any problem that stems from some kind of physical scarcity.

But hunger and disease are two hard problems that are particularly easy to conceive, and whose solutions are likewise readily understood: basically, more food and better medicine. Once a problem and its solution are understood, implementing the solution is very often a matter of working out the technical details.

I think that many of the hard problems facing us are not so easily conceived, and their solutions once conceived are far from obvious. For example: what, if anything, should we do about rising income inequality? What consequences does polarization in political discourse have for our ability to address the divergent needs and interests of different groups of people? Which of our social norms are beneficial, and which are harmful? What reasons do we have to support the production of fine art or architecture, and how (if at all) should we do it? What rights and treatment should our institutions afford to those (prisoners, revolutionaries, the merely uninterested) who directly or indirectly undermine them?

I think these questions---and others like them, which we might not even have the language to express yet---are some of the hardest yet most important questions to answer. But they don't boil down to questions of "scarcity" in any obvious way, and I have a hard time seeing how technical training could ever help produce citizens who are capable of answering them in a reflective and reasonable way.

That doesn't mean that STEM training isn't valuable. And as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739) many STEM programs are liberal arts programs that do provide the skills required to answer questions like these.