Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gen Z is giving up on college

businessinsider.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#11

Post by Mistletoe »

Racing0461 wrote: post #4

That would be the correct assessment given the return of college vs the cost. Unless you want to be a doctor/lawyer/dentist/engineer, college isn't really worth it. and to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated…

80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average.

>The average cost of attendance for a student living on campus at a public 4-year in-state institution is $26,027 per year or $104,108 over 4 years.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#12

Post by Almondsetat »

rikketikm wrote: post #5

How do you expect people to study humanities if you're making it inherently impossible?

I don't understand why people confuse studying with getting a diploma.

You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#13

Post by aetherspawn »

College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc.

For the other unregulated fields its unsurprising considering that the quality of education was questionable compared with just reading half a dozen good books.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#14

Post by mkl95 »

As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#16

Post by Traubenfuchs »

Lumping students of useless liberal arts "degrees" together with those on their way to becoming neurosurgeons, quants, investment bankers, lawyers or strategy consultants is a disgusting media default I can not comprehend. You CAN NOT lump those together for an average. Different planets. Different universes.

Besides that: Aren‘t colleges as full as ever? Any college has trouble to fill a new semester?

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#17

Post by tyroi34iooi »

> They're not as interested in the typical "college experience" — whiling away four years rooming with friends and drinking at frat parties.

They are, but college is not place to do that! People can not give a consent while drunk, at college you are definitely not getting away with it!

> And many students are no longer drawn by the traditional mission of a liberal-arts education: to foster critical thinking and informed discourse.

They are, but college is not place where liberal-arts education is! Last 4 years had shown that. Asking for evidence, or criticizing something, will get you in trouble at college!

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#18

Post by dahart »

> Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn.

Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not.

In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn, which is a lot bigger than I thought before I looked it up. The Fed published the stats in an article a few years ago that was trying to suggest college was becoming not worth it, but once I looked at the raw data, it convinced me the other way. (This article has its own misleading comparisons by using ratios and ignoring absolutes, for example suggesting someone who saves 5x their salary is less well off than someone else who saves 6x their salary even when the 5x person has twice the income.) https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#19

Post by quickthrower2 »

mkl95 wrote: post #14

As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.

I can't imagine what it is like doing a degree these days in say CS, when the wealth of information on Youtube is incredible, and you can self-pace and learn interesting stuff. Postgrad would still be a different story.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#20

Post by blowski »

mkl95 wrote: post #14

As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.

Online degrees seem to focus on teaching materials that are cheap to obtain elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to have seminars led by someone qualified, but I guess the numbers don’t add up for this.
Post reply on HN