Gen Z is giving up on college

A bit of context: I undertook my 1st undergraduate program from 2007 to 2011, did an erasmus on 2010-2011, masters on 2013-2014 and Phd from 214 to 2017.

When I started at 2007 (in Spain), there was a lot of freedom. No need to go to lesson (only certain labs were compulsory), most of the the courses will not have any compulsory hand in course works. For 95% of my courses was enough to sit for the exam and pass it. Exams were difficult, rarely less than 2h and always 'unseen' problems. Failing was an option and we all experience it. You could always enroll again and try the year after. Another thing I had rarely experience afterwards, lecturer will treat you as an adult. They will talk to you as an adult, give you the freedom and expect you to behave as one.

All these freedoms allow us to learn about ourselves, do you really enjoy the topics? Do you need to spend 3h a week listening to the teacher or are you better off dealing with a different subject? Do you need 1 week to prepare for an exam or rather 9 months?

Making failure an option helped maintaining a high standard on learning outcome. There was no need to lower the bar so everyone could pass.

Also getting fees were nearly null and there were plenty of scholarships. The idea was something like everyone should have the opportunity to go to university, but only those who were ready could obtain a degree.

Later on, as I explored universities in other countries I felt it was more like, you can pay us X$ for Y years and at the end you get a shiny diploma.

Then as I shifted into software engineering, I found all the resources I needed were online. That together with the fact that universities tend to be slow to introduce new material and shift content, plus the high costs, plus the little freedom they provide, plus the focus they have on money, make universities loose appeal.

Though I'm a little salty because my wife bought in to the lie that studying the humanities is what you do for a career, yet her acquaintances who "made it" mostly have low-paying but high prestige jobs and a spouse who covers the bills for what is, in effect, a hobby.

""" When the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.

The data for Black families showed the same pattern, but with an even more pronounced downturn. As with the white graduates, older Black college grads were enjoying sizable wealth advantages over their less-educated peers, with generally two or three times the assets of comparable Black high school grads. But Black college graduates born after 1980 were experiencing almost no wealth premium at all. In fact, the researchers found that the wealth premium for Black grads disappeared even earlier than it did for the white graduates. Black college graduates born in the 1970s weren’t receiving any substantial wealth benefit, either, only those born in the 1960s and earlier. Latino families followed a similar pattern. If they were headed by someone born after 1980, they had accumulated no significant additional resources beyond those of a comparable family headed by a high school graduate.

"""

From https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-pr... - source paper is at https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...

It make sense, I suppose, that in an efficient market the cost of college would rise to capture the return.