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Gen Z is giving up on college

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Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#101

Post by nudgeee »

ActorNightly wrote: post #89
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 comp…

Engineering = mechanical/aerospace/chemical/electrical/biomedical/material, etc.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#102

Post by friend_and_foe »

hef19898 wrote: post #78
MrPatan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then no one can pay for college anyway

But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?

No.

Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree, you wind up in a scenario where a nation wastes 4 years per generation only to wind up with the same economic landscape later. They'll cut these programs well before that happens. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#103

Post by squokko »

dahart wrote: post #59
squokko wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the bottom third of people who don't go to college don't ever consider going to college.

So, why does that make it a valid comparison? What data backs up this claim about not considering college (as opposed to chose not to)? The bottom third of people who do go to college don’t fare as well as the rest, and probably considered dropping out. It’s simply not valid to compare the bottom third of college grads to the top, middle, and bottom thirds of high school grads. They only did that so they could say th…

The only people making a real decision are the people on the border. The valedictorian is always going to college and the lunkhead is not. The only useful analysis is the one in the middle.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#104

Post by johnnyanmac »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #60
erfgh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.

>Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked. A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (w…

>we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.

because it can be hard to be honest about our loved ones. Everyone wants to say Bobby is a genius and can grow up to be president. But having a 2.3 GPA and no drive in life means getting through the first year of community college will be a challenge, at least a challenge for Bobby. There are core questions to answer before we keep pushing Bobbby down such a path but his support network may never ask those questions to begin with.

Meanwhile, Andy with a 4.0 GPA, nationally acclaimed talent, and mutliple top college acceptances has the world as his oyster. He could probably go to art school and have the drive to end up in a highly successful career, even if that type of schooling tends to end up as one of the worst ROI. OFC, Andy's support network may be pushing him to be a doctor or Lawyer so there's still issues there.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#105

Post by friend_and_foe »

bdamm wrote: post #7

Fundamentally, college is about building skills and networking with people. Leveraging AI should be taught in all college curriculum since it is a power multiplier for everyone. This idea that AI is making college irrelevant is completely absurd to me.

You can build skills and network with people on your computer, for free.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#106

Post by skotobaza »

yolkedgeek wrote: post #53

I'm almost finnishing my bachelors in software engineering. I really wish I didn't have to waste all these years in university. I could've learned much more by self study. the traditional teaching system which is centuries old, is very bad and backwards. we have advanced in every aspect, we are reaching new milestones everyday, but our education system hasn't changed much from the start of time. this is awful.

Can you give an example?

I studied software engineering in university and it wasn't ideal but it gave me the most important stuff: the learning system and almost complete overview of software and hardware development used in computer science jobs. Most people who do self-study only learn a very small subset of this knowledge - one or two programming languages and frameworks and maybe a little bit of algorithms.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#107

Post by piva00 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #89
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 comp…

You can't be a civil, mechanical, aerospace, marine, chemical, etc. engineer through software... Software is just a tool for engineering disciplines, not everyone wants to be writing software instead of designing and building physical things.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#108

Post by johnnyanmac »

ActorNightly wrote: post #89
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 comp…

>Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree,

In a vacuum, yes. In reality, I'm not sure I would have gotten past courses in stuff like Systems, compilers, and networks without being able to poke at peers and professors alike in order to get my head around them. Maybe some curated masterclasses could do the same thing for cheaper ("hundreds" instead of thousands), but those are a much more recent phenomenon; certainly not something widely known nor available a decade ago when I started school.

It's also a matter of "you don't know what you dont know". There are all kinds of stories of prodigies who were tinkering with code since they were 10. Meanwhile, I'm a graphics engineer, and I didn't even know what DirectX was until my 2nd year of college. It's an affordance that is increasingly less of an option, but the ability to see and dabble in different domains really helped me shape what I enjoyed or didn't. Without that experimentation, I saw myself freshman year working as an Android app developer. That changed quickly.

There's a lot of factors to take into account.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#109

Post by friend_and_foe »

77pt77 wrote: post #55
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.

Is that 35K for someone with a PhD?

A doctorate in lab technician? I highly doubt it.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#110

Post by friend_and_foe »

theodric wrote: post #85

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 chos…

It's hard to gauge what point you're making. You supposedly paid for class, if you could've skipped class and gotten all the benefit you got from it, did college give you the benefit, or was it just getting out in the world and being around people your age?
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