More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years • Hacker News Board

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#481

Post by endisneigh » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

rootsudo wrote: post #473

endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

I'm not surprised at all - people with degrees try to find reasons to think they're better then the rest. 1. Many trades also are your own business, and can immediately scale for income - many plumbers, electricians, etc are millionaires with a small team of employees less than 15. 2. Google offers free marketing certification for this reason as well, it's not impossible for marketing/seo people to make 100k annually…

1. You can also start your own business with a college degree. Let’s compare like for like here.

2. Where are the stats?

3. Sure, many colleges are worth it too. State schools don’t cost 45k a semester. Don’t know how you can spread misinformation.

4. Community college can be very cheap, it depends on where you are and how poor you are so it’s hard to draw broad strokes here.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#482

Post by endisneigh » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

silisili wrote: post #471

endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

Re 1, at least in the US, it's very dependent on market and path. I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor. If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a…

How old are you and how old are they? If we’re talking anecdotes I guarantee I know people that make more than all the people you’ve mentioned combined and went to college. It doesn’t mean anything. Let’s talk medians here.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#483

Post by learc83 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

hallway_monitor wrote: post #373

commandlinefan wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their universal concern is the cost. I have a senior in high school right now and although I think you're right - he's concerned about a potential quarter-million dollar tuition bill before this whole thing is over - he's also concerned about the whole selectivity of it all. From the outside looking in, you never know what's important and what's not. He has this feeling (and I'm not sure I can dispute it) that the…

> give up and go into a trade Exactly this, without the "give up" part. Why is going into a trade giving up? It's choosing a different path than the one that has been shoved down all our throats like it is the only respectable option. University is not for everyone, and not everyone can go there. There's simply not enough room. I think going into trades is what I want my son to do. I love Mike Rowe's thoughts on this…

I have many family members in the trades. "The trades" is not a homogenous group of jobs. Some of them got lucky and got good union jobs. Most of them work hard jobs that are hard on their bodies. They have an income that's enough to live on, but money is always tight. I know very few tradesmen in their 50s and 60s who would tell their children to follow their career path, other than the relative few who have managed to work their way up so that they are managing tradesmen, not working as a tradesman.

If you have a very specific career in mind then sure go for it, but just telling people to "go into the trades" is probably harmful.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#484

Post by rurp » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #457

jacobolus wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime Just as with claims about college, there is a huge selection bias in this observation. (A substantially higher proportion of youngish Americans obtain a bachelors degree than have a job before age 18.) Edit: Let’s be clear: there is obviously a huge selection bias when talking about college as well, which should not be ign…

> A substantially higher proportion of Americans obtain a bachelors degree than have a job before age 18. Is this true? I got a job as soon as I was legally allowed to and so did every one of my friends in high school. Where I'm from you were seen as kind of a loser if you didn't work over the summer, at least. I'd guess it was something like 90% of kids at my school worked at some point in high school. Edit: Here's…

Interesting. I'm also surprised by those numbers. I had a job in high school and so did most of my friends. Maybe not 90% of them, but I'm sure it was >60% of people I knew.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#485

Post by light_hue_1 » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #444

indymike wrote: post #314

There are three problems that colleges need to fix. 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. 2) There are better options than college for many. One of my daughters did a si…

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

> 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made.

Plenty of coding bootcamps have great placement rates and great salaries. For example, the median salary at Boston's Launch academy is $72k. The median salary for Fullstack Academy Grace Hopper in NY is $90k.

https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf...

This organization verifies outcomes independently: https://cirr.org/data

I know several people who have gone to both of these, the data is legit, that's the outcome I saw from the graduating class.

> 3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive. Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?

Even "cheap" state schools aren't so cheap https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college We're still talking on average $25k/year. But that depends heavily on the state. In some states, you pay $14k in others $30k. Either way. Not cheap.

The rise in cost has been amazing: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp In the 1960s total tuition + room + board inflation corrected was only $1000!

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#486

Post by dzonga » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

samarama wrote: post #126

sylens wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's quite clearly this. Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classe…

Are student loans really such an issue? 85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much. https://www.rclco.com/wp-content/uploads/advisory-student-de... Additionally, those that have much higher loans are usually medical students who make $200,000/year at the entry level.

I know someone who's about to a Physical Therapist, doctorate. she's gonna leave school owing 200k+. yet starting salary will be 85k that I made coming out of state college as a CS grad.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#487

Post by jimz » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

lapsedacademic wrote: post #357

granshaw wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is the social stigma of not having a college degree. Not sure how to fix that

> the social stigma of not having a college degree People have been saying this for decades, but is it still really a thing? Perhaps on the coasts? If you're in a small or mid-sized city in the midwest or the south, it's almost exactly the opposite...

I'm sure in some social circles or professions it is, but after college I've lived in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, and Las Vegas, and outside of the context where the existence of my degree is a necessity by virtue of state law in order to undertake the profession I was in, it really doesn't come up, ever. In part, it's probably because facebook had us all list our education particularly my cohort who needed a .edu email address to sign up, but even after I got off facebook and changed careers entirely, it's just not something that comes up. I don't know if there's simply a presumption that I'm "one of them" or because I have a social circle that isn't entirely homogeneous educationally, but I can't even really think of how the subject matter would come up, or why anyone should care.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#488

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

rootsudo wrote: post #473

endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im very skeptical of this post: 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades, do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education? 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no compari…

I'm not surprised at all - people with degrees try to find reasons to think they're better then the rest. 1. Many trades also are your own business, and can immediately scale for income - many plumbers, electricians, etc are millionaires with a small team of employees less than 15. 2. Google offers free marketing certification for this reason as well, it's not impossible for marketing/seo people to make 100k annually…

[deleted]

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#489

Post by olyjohn » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

DerArzt wrote: post #345

granshaw wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is the social stigma of not having a college degree. Not sure how to fix that

Step one would be to re-asses what happens in highschools. I remember a decade ago when I was in highschool we had to do college prep stuff mandated by the state government that all but said that College was the only route.

This! When I was in high school, the school barely mentioned Running Start or the local trade school. My high school computer classes consisted of me learning from the way-underpaid and overworked IT guy, and not any actual teachers. The high school only had classes on Keyboarding, 10-key, and a handful of Macs that had some Photoshop on them for the photography students...

Meanwhile Running Start gets you your 2 year degree by the time you graduate, so 2 years less debt, and 2 years ahead of everybody else. The trade school had game programming classes, automotive, electronics classes... which were things I was actually interested in learning at the time and were not remotely available at the HS itself.

But if you do either of those two things, the high school loses and FTE count, and the money gets diverted to the other school. So the HS tends to hardly tell anybody about them. Not to mention, they made the trade school seem like a place where delinquents go who can't handle high school and get into college. Looking back, I wish I had known more about the trade school, because there were so many more interesting classes there!

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#490

Post by lokar » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #314

There are three problems that colleges need to fix. 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. My kids can make more money with a six month apprenticeship than they will with all but a few 4 year degrees. If you can drive a forklift, you can make $45K/yr... which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes. 2) There are better options than college for many. One of my daughters did a si…

What do teachers and forklift operators make after 10/20/30 years?