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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

#461

Post by mantas »

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.

At the same time many families got a single room with shared anemities. Even people in skilled positions. Just because they got assigned to some factory which management didnt have as good connections. Or preferred to pocket more than take care of workers. Or didn’t ended up in some location where central government was putting in extra resources to make it more desirable.

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

#462

Post by carlosjobim »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #130
pdonis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started during WW II when the US government put wage and price controls in place so that companies could not compete for employees by offering higher wages. So they competed for employees instead by offering employer-paid healthcare as a benefit. Then after the war, when the wage and price controls were repealed, the employer-paid healthcare system, instead of going away, kept getting more elaborate.

As with a lot of things, such as vacation time, Americans seem to prefer to provide certain social goods as employer benefits because that way it seems more like a reward for competitive merit, which one can show off as a status symbol, than like a universal social good.

Another way to see it is to ask why a company should be able to reap the labour benefits of their workers and then force other people to pay for their basic needs?

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

#463

Post by pfdietz »

the_gipsy wrote: post #414
pfdietz wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would dispute the "downward" part there. Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense. Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.

"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.

Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.

Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.

I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.

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

#464

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

seec wrote: post #325
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>things are seriously politically messed up I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice... The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college. Wha…

That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A tr…

Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.

This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.

The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.

DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.

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

#465

Post by watwut »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #451
overfeed wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.

> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues…

This is not true. Whole conservative departments do well and exist. Moreover, whole ideologically pure christian conservative universities exist. Literally kicking off students for "infractions" that go against evangelical orthodoxy.

Some people got off due to sexual harassment not being as cool as before, history and sociology started to study women and minorities. The problem is that conservatives see that just existing as a threat. If the history is not biased their way, they feel like victims.

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

#466

Post by tonyedgecombe »

stefs wrote: post #378
danans wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.

While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.

>While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s

I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

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

#467

Post by MonkeyClub »

the_gipsy wrote: post #376
kiba wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine. As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.

America is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.

> Russia will conquer Ukraine

Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent.

This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

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

#468

Post by jimnotgym »

zbzdrol wrote: post #460
rayiner wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.

> A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation. You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better. If that were the case, why did most of the world bend western and American in the latter 20th century culturally? The problems now are that we have a super-old man and a bunch of others with super-old ideas at the helm, and as a whole…

> You’re basically arguing that having more uneducated people is better.

Are you arguing that having more people educated in a narrow range of topics is necessarily better? In the USA in the 1950s I would suggest there were more people who knew how to make machine tools or even food.

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

#469

Post by firesteelrain »

closewith wrote: post #444
kiba wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine. As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.

Okay, as Devil's Advocate, you could say the same about the US. It was unable to conquer Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.

This is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate.

US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.

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

#470

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

lurk2 wrote: post #412
overfeed wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities Yes - and? Police forces and catholic churches skew conservative, but I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas. You seem like you expect political "neutrality", but if you look at at any institution, you'll find "bias": theatre fook, country music, poet…

> I figure it's an emergent property based on the self-selected group who join the respective organizations plus some exposure to new ideas. There are plenty of conservatives interested in anthropology; there’s no reason to think they’ve self-selected out of the pool, so then we have to consider if conservatives enter the field but are exposed to new ideas such that none remain conservatives for long (this seems unli…

Being interested is not the same as being competent.

Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.

Brexit. Anti-vax campaigns. Anti-masking. Racism. "Lowering corporate taxes makes everyone richer."

All delusional, all emotionally motivated, all predictable failures with terrible consequences.

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