I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
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
#532Earlier 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…
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.
We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wh…
If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was Pearl Harbor attacked by Japan? Now, when did Hawai'i become a state? And when and by whom was their king deposed? > Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked. Uh, which country again was it? (Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier fo…
Hawaii was a US territory as was Alaska (which was also attacked). As is Puerto Rico today.
An occupied territory, sure. The Japanese only attacked the occupiers (USA). They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom
In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up > gen X / boomer Those 2 generations aren't even remotely close in terms of shared experience of what high school diploma was like when they grew up.
Well that specific example paragraph was about financial aid, not the value of a high school diploma, so I fail to see your point.
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced.
You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#536The 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. Other…
> 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.
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#538Earlier 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…
> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extract…
Exactly. In a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.
In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.
Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?
You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.
This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#539Earlier 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…
> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.
Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.
Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you take nukes off the table, the U.S. doesn’t have a 100x military advantage. If China seriously mobilized its industrial capability, the U.S. may not have even a 2x advantage. Remember that, right before World War II, the US didn’t even have a top-10 military, having demobilized it after World War I. It’s vast industrial capacity is what enabled it to build a larger military than all of Europe combined within a…
The US was also much more unified at the time. That’s the thing about history: Like economy, it’s human matter, and you could reproduce and experiment twice and get completely different result because your systems are not isolated in location or time.
>The US was also much more unified at the time
Were we? Or is that just after the fact revisionism that makes things "easy"
If Europe had managed to keep it together a few more years the US may very well have had a bunch of communism adjacent social strife and FDR may have died a deposed tyrant.
We were certainly more unified on certain broad cultural and values axis, but things were still very divided.