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Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#281

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

crossbody wrote: post #184
mbesto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to follow you. I don't get how Baumol's has a higher degree of effectiveness in the US than it does in the EU? Are you saying there are more tech companies and therefore tech roles in the US than EU and thus those drive up non-tech wages even though they aren't as productive?

Exactly

I call bullshit on this.

There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.

Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#282

Post by monero-xmr »

rayiner wrote: post #234
collinmcnulty wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans. Finally, it’s worth quali…

Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.

I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#283

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #272
RomanPushkin wrote: post #233

Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.

Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.

They are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free".

The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#284

Post by petesergeant »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #139
petesergeant wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job

American colleges give out a GPA, which used to mean something but has now been inflated to the point of meaninglessness. 60% of my college class 10 years ago had a 3.5/4 or higher. The median grade at Harvard is an A. I am told that since COVID, B grades and below now require a written explanation by the professor at several schools.

> The median grade at Harvard is an A

It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.

Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#285

Post by viccis »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #227

Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko... Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any pr…

>Is this not rational behavior?

If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.

If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.

Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#286

Post by integralid »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #254
anonymars wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming

Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the…

If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#287

Post by logicchains »

angst wrote: post #104

This is worrisome. College experience does provide unique benefits compared to self-learning.

But in the long term it seems to destroy the ability to self-learn; the vast majority of graduates go out of their way to avoid acquiring any new academic knowledge after graduation. College (aside from phd programs) fails at teaching people how to learn.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#288

Post by apparent »

The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings.

And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.

Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#289

Post by nebula8804 »

ajashdkjhasjkd wrote: post #223
jswelker wrote: post #102

Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…

> People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science. The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.

Schools typically have no space to squeeze it in. Here is a typical pathway for a CS student: https://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/computing-sciences/co...

A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.

Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).

Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).

Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.

I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#290

Post by viccis »

naet wrote: post #191
nashashmi wrote: post #122

Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money. Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years. My math comes out to the college grad is still making more m…

Anecdotally my wife came very close to finishing a 4 year degree but ultimately did not for various reasons (she comes from a very disadvantaged family...) and not having one has been a major burden or blocker for her pursuing all kinds of jobs. I am hoping to help her finish, but it is hard to restart later in life and lots of past credits will probably be lost or not count anymore due to various academic bureaucrac…

Yep, I've seen this with a lot of my friends who did a similar thing. HR employees screening you out alone is a huge problem.

I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up, and if you don't have one, then in all likelihood, you will struggle to not be downwardly mobile, as it's the new middle class gatekeeping tool.

People should NOT listen to anyone over 45-50 or so who tells them college isn't necessary. Those people grew up in a world that no longer exists.

Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.

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