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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#311

Post by DoreenMichele »

supernova87a wrote: post #306
DoreenMichele wrote: post #288

I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable. (I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the de…

Wait, if you're 55 now, you grew up in basically the golden age of US growth and the easy value of a college degree at relatively cheap tuition. And you had friends back then who were saddled with college debt that led to dead end jobs? The situation, is way, way worse now. Orders of magnitude worse.

Yes, I know. That's why I added the qualifier I did: I'm aware that not stating I did this decades ago could be misconstrued as saying "You fools just need to live at home and go to the local college. Problem solved!"

I'm not interested in being thusly misconstrued.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#312

Post by dumbfoundded »

mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#313

Post by JJMcJ »

tptacek wrote: post #301
hajile wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A federal government can dictate what it thinks morality should be, but in practice cannot enforce morality in a free country. Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous…

Guilds and unions are not the same thing. No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.

Craft unions, like in construction, are more like guilds than the industrial unions. You must qualify in one way or another to be a union member before you can get hired by a union company.

But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#314

Post by mcguire »

mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

Have you seen The Great Courses (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/)?

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#315

Post by mcguire »

"Higher education is often described as an investment. But it’s still unclear if it pays off in happiness."

Nothing, nothing will guarantee happiness. Or a good life.

Make the best decisions you can, by which I mean try to make decisions that you will not regret later. (Have I made a crap-ton of mistakes in my life? Sure 'nuff. Would I make different decisions if I could, even knowing what I know now? Probably not.)

And for the love of Pete, stop denigrating those who have made different choices. Sure, it may make you feel better about your situation temporarily, but it is very, very unappealing.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#316

Post by simplify »

lozaning wrote: post #305
simplify wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bankruptcy negatively affects your credit score by a large amount, so it's not exactly an easy decision.

It would be a very easy decision I think. Can you rebuild your credit in less time than it would take you to pay off your loans? If you're still going to be paying your loan off in 7 years, bankruptcy would be an easy choice.

What if you need do anything significant with your money in those 7 years? Like rent an apartment? Have a car to get to work?

The debt doesn't just magically go away. Chapter 7 requires liquidating assets, and chapter 13 requires paying some loans back anyway. And besides, I don't see why loan companies couldn't require cosigners to reduce risk on these college loans.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#317

Post by chipgap98 »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #312
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

I can't emphasize this point enough. I learned a ton in the classes I took, but the real value I got from college was the people I was exposed to. I built a ton of lasting friendships and a strong network there, but more important was just the experience of being around smart and motivated people. My peers in college had higher ambitions and expectations for their lives than the people I grew up with. That caused me to shift how I thought about my own life and put me on a very different path. That just would not have happened if I took online classes.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#318

Post by dqv »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #310
dqv wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped out of college precisely because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. Did you do full-time college and full-time job when you returned? How was balancing that with all the other life responsibilities?

I went to school part-time and intermittently while very ill and homeschooling my special-needs sons. I also completed a couple of different certificate programs with a compressed scheduled, one in a Summer Camp format where you completed a year-long certificate program in two months, and the other was a month of going to school eight hours a day on my employer's dime when I got a corporate job. I wrapped up an Assoc…

Thanks for the advice. This is pretty much what I was planning to do - part-time and mostly online - but I wasn't confident it was possible to get a degree this way.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#320

Post by mcguire »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #312
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

I strongly agree.

When I was an undergraduate, the "lower division", more introductory, required courses were taught by specialists in "Computer Science Education", whatever the heck that is. I hated them. They were ... useful, as a basis for everything later, but they weren't taught well and if that is all there were, I would be very unhappy about the time and money wasted. Then I reached the "upper division", mostly elective courses taught by active researchers in the given field. Sure, their lectures and such were not well polished and rather uneven, but their enthusiasm for the subject generally shone through and you could get more insight from a chat with a professor on a ten-minute walk from class than from any textbook you've ever seen.

TAs that could understand the material and see where you went wrong. Classmates who were challenging and who asked questions you never thought about.

The whole package is what makes it good.

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