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Gen Z is giving up on college

businessinsider.nl

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Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#81

Post by dahart »

CalRobert wrote: post #70
dahart wrote: post #18

> 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…

Earning is one thing, wealth is another. """ 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 wh…

Yeah this effect of wealth premium going down could be due to the rapid rise of college costs. It has gone up faster than inflation for a long time.

The wealth premium is the part I was referring to about this being somewhat misleading, IMO. They calculate wealth premium in terms of a ratio of savings at retirement to yearly salary. They show plots of the wealth premium trending down and saying that savings with a degree are soon to be not better of than savings without. However, this hides the fact that the degree holders have 2x the savings in absolute dollars compared to non-degree holders when the wealth premium is “zero” (because the degree holders have 2x the income).

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#82

Post by hef19898 »

CalRobert wrote: post #63
hef19898 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany you also have the issue of an increased number of studies to choose from, roughly 15 years ago you had some specialozation added on top of your general studies. Now some of those are standalone studies. Switching once is totally fine, after all you only what a given field looks like once you started. Maybe even twice. But by then one should now which field and degree to pursue.

How do you switch mid-career?

I talked about mid-studies, preferably early so. Mid-career is harder, but doable. It largly depends on your field of study and experience. The more you are working at the interface between disciplines / industries / technologies, the easier it to switch between those. That's a career choice so, you can try to be more generalistic, and make career switches easier, or become specialized. Both are valod choices.

That is one reason why I think education should be as generic as possible, if you already specialize a lot durong your studies, being young and having zero job exoerience, carries the risk of making your career a bit harder.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#83

Post by [deleted] »

squokko wrote: post #33
dahart wrote: post #18

> 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…

Not really, that bottom third is the third who shouldn't go to college, and there are ways of knowing whether your child is in that bottom third before they spend $200,000 doing it.

[deleted]

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#84

Post by Wildgoose »

Mistletoe wrote: post #11
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…

It's a shame that nobody seems to have understood the comparison you were making.

You can directly compare the value of investing money in education and the stock market. If you had $80,000 to invest at 18 you often would be better simply investing in the stock market.

Most people of course borrow the sums required which means the interest increases the monies owed as opposed to gains from investment earnings. And the monies borrowed are owed come what may, not even bankruptcy allows escape from the debt and accumulating interest.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#85

Post by theodric »

Attending university was extremely valuable to me: I got to escape my parents, hang out with other people of compatible interests, experience broadband for the first time, and best of all, meet my wife.

Oh, and employers sometimes filter on 'has degree' vs 'no degree' when selecting who to interview. It hasn't seemed to matter that my degree (music, specifically music performance) was completely irrelevant to my chosen line of work, and has contributed nothing to my career. I should've just skipped class.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#86

Post by Gigachad »

CodinM wrote: post #31
Almondsetat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a green heron since the issue at hand isn't "oh but you can study without a diploma", the issue is "you won't be taken seriously because you don't have credentials" e.g. piece of paper.

How true is this though? At least in tech, I have never felt held back by not having a degree. How many jobs does having a humanities degree unlock?

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#87

Post by dagw »

nottheengineer wrote: post #27

Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany. We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said t…

I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US.

The one interesting 'feature' of US education is that you don't really pick a subject before the 2nd or even 3rd year. It is quite possible (and common) to spend the first 2 years studying much a wider variety of subjects than you would at most European universities and then spending your final 2 years really focusing in on what you decide to be your core are of focus.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#88

Post by theodric »

Almondsetat wrote: post #36
CodinM wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a green heron since the issue at hand isn't "oh but you can study without a diploma", the issue is "you won't be taken seriously because you don't have credentials" e.g. piece of paper.

I mean, what credentials does a humanities graduate actually have? Who would need such knowledge in any job except for a humanities job itself?

Indeed, nobody takes us seriously regardless of what the paperwork says

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#89

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

>engineer

College isn't generally worth it for engineering either, unless you really want to work for something government or government adjacent where there is an explicit requirement for a degree.

Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree, and software development is applicable to all engineering, with more and more of the "expertise" of other fields being moved into computer software.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#90

Post by freilanzer »

CalRobert wrote: post #61
nottheengineer wrote: post #27

Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany. We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said t…

I moved from the US to Europe (first Ireland, now Netherlands) and one thing I really, really miss is junior colleges. Sure there's a few post-leaving-cert or adult education classes but in California I could just go to www.smc.edu/, sign up for stuff that looked interesting (Android dev, Assembly, and German in the last semester I was there for reference), pay nominal tuition and keep my career going, and go lean co…

That sounds great and much more like the concept that a university should be than what we have in Germany. I couldn't deviate from my courses in the slightest way, even when they didn't make any sense: mathematical logic held by a linguist because no one else was available. Wanted to take statistics, which would be highly relevant, instead? Well, you can't.
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