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Gen Z is giving up on college

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Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#111

Post by jwestbury »

Racing0461 wrote: post #4

That would be the correct assessment given the return of college vs the cost. Unless you want to be a doctor/lawyer/dentist/engineer, college isn't really worth it. and to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated…

I think this is a bit of a reductive -- and likely inaccurate -- approach, as university is (a) not seen by everybody as purely vocational training and (b) may have benefits that aren't as easily quantified.

For my part: I'm a high earner in a technical field who has a B.A. in English literature, despite having intended to major in computer science. My field of study helped me become more open-minded, improved my writing skills, and helped me to develop soft skills, all of which have been more helpful to my career than my technical skills (based on my own observations and feedback from peers and managers).

University can be a transformative experience if not treated as vocational training; but that's also a good argument for increased vocational training and less emphasis on attending university.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#112

Post by johnnyanmac »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #102
hef19898 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?

No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay,…

>Look, the cost comes from somewhere.

yeah, the government let a private corporation manage it, and they lobbied for laws to make sure their loans are un-defaultable. It's just free, guaranteed money for them.

And college isn't getting more expensive because of higher costs, it's getting more expensive because they can add a bunch of fancy amenties that are used as advertisement, even if it doesn't directly help with the education aspect. Even 10 years ago there were thousands of dollars of costs per semester on misc. fees that I couldn't opt out of. it was basically a tax from my school.

So yeah, the cost comes from somewhere, and both the funders and the beneficiaries have every incentive to bloat it.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#113

Post by kimi »

CalRobert wrote: post #64
rikketikm wrote: post #5

How do you expect people to study humanities if you're making it inherently impossible?

Libraries continue to exist. Though I'm a little salty because my wife bought in to the lie that studying the humanities is what you do for a career, yet her acquaintances who "made it" mostly have low-paying but high prestige jobs and a spouse who covers the bills for what is, in effect, a hobby.

Welcome to academia.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#114

Post by piva00 »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #102
hef19898 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?

No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay,…

> Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees.

Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth generated by that is squandered by a class of people, a society needs people to be educated to be able to innovate and generate new wealth.

If you are only thinking in financial terms there's no way for higher education to ever make sense in the long term, given that over time it slowly becomes the new status quo (as it's happening), and salaries won't ever continue to increase with higher education when there's a larger and larger share of the labour pool highly educated. It is still a net benefit to society to have highly educated people, there's more specialised labourers to draw from to transform ideas into wealth generation.

I don't think we should ever think of education in purely individual's finance terms, I gladly pay my taxes (in parts to fund education) in a country where I wasn't educated in because I know it benefits me in the end, more educated people helps to avoid economical stagnation.

It's not free lunch but giving everyone in a society an equal opportunity to achieve specialised education is a net positive in the long term, even if it costs a lot. The same with healthcare.

> With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree

That already happens in the USA even with education being as expensive it is, I don't believe it's a sound argument...

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#115

Post by hef19898 »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #102
hef19898 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is, again, a US problem, isn't it?

No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay,…

And there I am, with my double degrees from a German Unibersity and not a single Euro in student debt... Instead of the average of student debt in the US, we have a mortgage on hous, and a house obviously. All that despite paying taxes, which also cover stuff like higher education.

Because do not forget, you pay taxes in the US as well. On top of your student loans and whatnot.

And no, Germany tried to cut tuition fees already. Those were abolished after, if memory serves well, a year or two.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#116

Post by knallfrosch »

dahart wrote: post #18

> Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try…

> Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison.

I don't think so. It's still a 1 in 3 chance of earning less with a college degree than without. It's useful to show how much overlap there is.

You could also argue that the bottom third of college graduates might also be the bottom earners without a degree, but at some point, you have to work with the real numbers that you do have, instead of hypotheticals.

To improve the article, one could have plotted the income distributions, so that readers can draw their own conclusion about risks.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#117

Post by friend_and_foe »

piva00 wrote: post #114
friend_and_foe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay,…

> Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth gen…

You don't believe that the scenario I'm describing as it is happening before your eyes is a sound argument?

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#118

Post by johnnyanmac »

Wildgoose wrote: post #84
Mistletoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average. >The average cost of attendance for a student living…

It's a shame that nobody seems to have understood the comparison you were making. You can directly compare the value of investing money in education and the stock market. If you had $80,000 to invest at 18 you often would be better simply investing in the stock market. Most people of course borrow the sums required which means the interest increases the monies owed as opposed to gains from investment earnings. And th…

even if I gave you the BOTD and assumed that the govt. simply gave every 18YO 80k to use as they see fit:

investing is an awful first thing to do unless you already have a job and stable life setup. Pretty much any sane financial planner will say

1. get your base costs covered 2. get an emergency savings 3. get a long term (3 months) savings 4. THEN you can invest

an 18YO trying to get their home situation put together will probably burn through a good portion just by renting out an apartment and getting the bare necessities. And ofc they need a few months to find what is probably a minimum wage job, which will probably not cover rent by itself.

If they can get over that huge hump, there won't be much left to invest (definitely not a 3 months savings).

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#119

Post by [deleted] »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #74
ReptileMan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then the western europe governments policy of porous borders and Gastarbeiter imports make sure that there can never really be a shortage of semi skilled labor so it is not clear if those trades can bring you to the middle class

That's how the "free market" works. If you can't afford a house anymore because it got too expensive, then sorry mate, you're out of luck, that's the fair price of the "free market" supply/demand. Nothing we can do about it, try being less poor next time. But if a company can't find cheap labor for the price it's willing to pay (aka labor shortage), then they can import as many workers as possible with the help of th…

[deleted]

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#120

Post by johnnyanmac »

dagw wrote: post #87
nottheengineer wrote: post #27

Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany. We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said t…

I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US. The one interesting 'feature' of US education is that you don't really pick a subject before the 2nd or even 3rd year. It is quite possible (and common) to spend the first 2 years studying much a wider variety of subjects than you would at most European universities and then spending your final 2 years really focusing in on what you decide to be y…

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