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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

#471
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the contraposition. • Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives. • Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished. It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.

You have better employment options only if there are not enough people with degrees. If you give everybody the option of obtaining a degree then nobody is better off. In fact those at the bottom of the barrel end up in an even worse position.

That assumes there are a large number of jobs that require no advanced education. Short of construction, those jobs flew overseas decades ago.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example:

    String.Join(" ",
      String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the contraposition. • Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives. • Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished. It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.

Of course there is. You can just hire them and train them. Most positions don't require college degrees. Everything you need to know for most jobs you learned in high school. At most you need a certificate program of some kind.

Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".

Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".

I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. MAYBE you’re making that in software (good luck getting your foot in the door). Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing? I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.

>Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.

Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.

You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view seems to be common, but I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well by having a middle c…

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.

> 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.

I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.

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

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

The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.

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

#476

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.

The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to hig…

It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school

Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%

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

#477
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exi…

Being segregated into different universities is exactly the thing you need not to happen, and your attitude is the exemplification of the problem. Who is going to feel welcome if their concerns are blindly maligned as prejudiced and in bad faith by default?

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

#478
post #334
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength. The modelling I've seen is that any US-China war will take place in Asia and China will probably win it unless the US gets a lot of help (always possible). And the US has already been undermined by the likes of China, Russia and India and there isn't a lot they can do about it in the…

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.

I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.

Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.

So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.

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

#479
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correlation is backwards. America’s mid-20th-century dominance was not the result of having only about 10 percent college graduates. It came from unique post–World War II advantages: intact industrial capacity, massive federal investment like the GI Bill, NSF, DARPA, and the interstate highway system, and the fact that global competitors were rebuilding from destruction. The GI Bill greatly expanded access to hig…

It was 10% of the US population who went to college before the GI bill, which then doubled to 20% over a decade following the war. Now >50% have post secondary. 70% attempt post-secondary after high school Before WW2 only about 40% of people completed high school, now it’s at 90%

Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.

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

#480
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.

So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers. I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers o…

Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
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