More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

They realize #3 has subsumed both #1 and #2 with the added twist of inescapable debt slavery with no deterministic way to complete those degrees. Education is no longer an investment, its a casino with the house winning 80% of the distribution.

I'm sure you've heard about weed-out classes where people fail not because of lack of knowledge, but from structure.

Apprenticeships are the only alternative to Professional certifications or educational degrees as job qualifiers.

The latter two options both have subsumed their original primary purpose and have exchanged those purposes for an overarching profit motive instead while stripping due process and agency.

If you know the material you should be able to pass no problem which is what people pay for when they go to college, but instead they are basically bait and switched which is a form of fraud, with no legal recourse in this case.

I'm sure some may argue that you can always sue, but look at ITT tech. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardconroy/2022/02/24/report-...).

I know people who have repeatedly failed Mechanics (Physics), while acing multiple heavy math courses above multivariate calculus.

Their biggest complaints were non-deterministic questions being asked on those tests, and structural course elements that induce causality spirals.

Example of the first being material the material taught is different from what was being tested with no adequate preparation, or in the case of inference there being multiple correct answers without enough information provided to deterministically come to a single correct answer, or in the case of heuristics where you build a context (or initial set of conditions) and that context should only lead to one answer but has multiple correct answers (with some uncommunicated assumption). They were all extremely upset because the tests amount to guesses, and some have repeated the same course every semester with different professors (same structural elements) over 3-5 years, even going so far as to take the course at different district colleges (same structural issues) before dropping out entirely due to the additional financial burden with no path forward.

Examples of the latter being, the answer of the second problem is dependent on the correct answer to the first, the answer of the third problem is dependent on the correct answer to the second. An arbitrarily uncommunicated rounding scheme guarantees most fail.

It might seem from the way I've said this that they just gave up, but it wasn't from lack of trying. Some escalated this from the Chairperson, to the Dean, to the Board of Directors over several years. Ultimately, no corrective action was taken, and its not a new story.

This is why people are generally not going to college and opting for other consistent options.

Of course college isnt devoid of all value and people want the best for their kids. Of course.

What? Do you mean college used to be paid for by taxes and now students have to pay for it and that's why college is so expensive? If not what exactly does that mean?

A link to a collection of ideological ramblings and one sided opinions isn't really "evidence" in any meaningful sense of the word. I could no doubt find a similar collection of faith based screeds that cherry pick facts in support of the conclusion that "Liberals have caused all this!" but it wouldn't be worth all that much.

We really need to move back into rational inquiry instead of ideological holy wars to solve the problems we collectively face in my opinion. And not just with education either.

General communication and writing skills aren't unique to the humanities.