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America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

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Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#11

Post by mmooss »

decimalenough wrote: post #8

The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies". It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money…

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities?

To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#12

Post by threatofrain »

mmooss wrote: post #11
decimalenough wrote: post #8

The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies". It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money…

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities? To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

And why should you sacrifice the ability to connect with opportunity just because you wanted to expand your mind? It's unfortunate that people should be presented with this forced choice.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#13

Post by titanomachy »

mjevans wrote: post #3

Skimmed TFA. This might be an accurate summary: Less kids are enrolling in college due to several factors. A decline in birthrates (right around the 2008 recession), a decline in those who calculate that college provides a real return on investment and the cost of lost opportunity, and also a third strike in the form of federal funding cuts. There's a bunch of example case sob story, a lot of emotional focus. Yet I d…

Most drugs are already banned. Lots of people do them anyways, especially college students.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#14

Post by kohbo »

mmooss wrote: post #11
decimalenough wrote: post #8

The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies". It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money…

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities? To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

There are other ways to do that. School is an investment.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#15

Post by somenameforme »

timr wrote: post #7

Anyone who looked at demographic trends 10+ years ago knew that this was coming. As far back as the late 90s, it was clear that universities were overinvesting into the one of the last echos of the baby boom.

A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today.

I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.

So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#16

Post by CuriouslyC »

mmooss wrote: post #11
decimalenough wrote: post #8

The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies". It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money…

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities? To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

Totally doable online from a beautiful beach in a much more affordable area. ChatGPT is better than a lot of professors I had and I went to a top tier university for my area of study, professors mostly were just there to do research and either weren't good teachers or didn't care to be.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#17

Post by vineyardmike »

mmooss wrote: post #11
decimalenough wrote: post #8

The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies". It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money…

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities? To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

You can do that in many institutions, why would you pick an institution with little reputation in these depressed cities?

The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.

Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#18

Post by sapphicsnail »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #16
mmooss wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities? To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.

Totally doable online from a beautiful beach in a much more affordable area. ChatGPT is better than a lot of professors I had and I went to a top tier university for my area of study, professors mostly were just there to do research and either weren't good teachers or didn't care to be.

I remember when Reddit blew up I started meeting people that had really specific bits of information, stuff that I would normally only see from someone with some sort of domain expertise, but were oblivious to the context in which that knowledge was produced and couldn't really do anything other than regurgitate the info. Really curious to see the sort of brain rot LLMs will bring.

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#19

Post by nyokodo »

somenameforme wrote: post #15
timr wrote: post #7

Anyone who looked at demographic trends 10+ years ago knew that this was coming. As far back as the late 90s, it was clear that universities were overinvesting into the one of the last echos of the baby boom.

A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today. I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do…

> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.

Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.

1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...

Re: America's College Towns Go from Boom to Bust

#20

Post by lilwobbly »

somenameforme wrote: post #10
mjevans wrote: post #3

Skimmed TFA. This might be an accurate summary: Less kids are enrolling in college due to several factors. A decline in birthrates (right around the 2008 recession), a decline in those who calculate that college provides a real return on investment and the cost of lost opportunity, and also a third strike in the form of federal funding cuts. There's a bunch of example case sob story, a lot of emotional focus. Yet I d…

Burn out and body damage from trades is not really factually based, especially not compared to something like software. You can actually quantify this. For instance the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50. By contrast in software there is extreme defacto age discrimination. I don't think it's usually real age discrimination but simply companies don't really value experie…

Body damage math isn’t even close. BLS puts non-fatal injuries in construction at 2.3 cases per 100 FTEs. For computer systems design it’s 0.1 – that’s a 23× gap.whole job takes a toll over time.

The median age of 42 just means a lot of sore 40-somethings can’t afford to quit yet. Age alone doesn’t tell you how their knees and backs feel after 20 years of rebar.

Not sure how many people you know in the industry but most architects, managers, etc... are 40+ years old. Not even remotely difficult to get hired as a senior engineer, way more in demand than 20 years old devs

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