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Gen Z is giving up on college

businessinsider.nl

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Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#51

Post by xboxnolifes »

komali2 wrote: post #25
quickthrower2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine what it is like doing a degree these days in say CS, when the wealth of information on Youtube is incredible, and you can self-pace and learn interesting stuff. Postgrad would still be a different story.

I find youtube content to be very lowest common denominator and just a difficult form to learn from. There's open source comp sci curriculum that compile various MooCs and free college courses though that I thought was phenomenal: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science

I agree that Youtube is very low quality (or non-existent) for most CS topics. I used Youtube (and other sources) often went I studied CS in college, but it was a constant search for the source that covered concepts relevant to what I was studying.

Youtube has a plethora of videos on introductory CS concepts, things that would be covered in the first 2-3 courses. After that, it's still very much a desert.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#52

Post by sparrowInHand »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #34
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…

>The world is rapidly growing in complexity Only if you work in stuff like tech, but the world still needs many other jobs like plumbers, police officers, etc. who's jobs don't change that fast.

.. and spanish translators.. for now..

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#53

Post by yolkedgeek »

I'm almost finnishing my bachelors in software engineering. I really wish I didn't have to waste all these years in university. I could've learned much more by self study. the traditional teaching system which is centuries old, is very bad and backwards. we have advanced in every aspect, we are reaching new milestones everyday, but our education system hasn't changed much from the start of time. this is awful.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#54

Post by squokko »

dahart wrote: post #45
squokko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, that bottom third is the third who shouldn't go to college, and there are ways of knowing whether your child is in that bottom third before they spend $200,000 doing it.

Yes really. The high school group also has a bottom third. It’s misleading to cherry pick one of them.

No, the bottom third of people who don't go to college don't ever consider going to college.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#55

Post by 77pt77 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.

Is that 35K for someone with a PhD?

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#56

Post by woopsn »

Mistletoe wrote: post #11
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…

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…

I mean, if you are 18 and come into $80k, by all means invest? That hardly invalidates the value of college education, which is an option for most high school graduates.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#57

Post by ReptileMan »

fabian2k wrote: post #32
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…

You usually don't have 80k lying around at 18, and nobody is going to loan you 80k to invest them (and even if they would, the interest would fundamentally change your calculation). And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off. So this comparison doesn't really make much sense as those students simply don't have the money…

> And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off.

When we talk about compound interest it is way off. Also sustained growth of that magnitude - especially if we want it above inflation is very hard and has occurred in very rare circumstances.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#58

Post by dguest »

Almondsetat wrote: post #12
rikketikm wrote: post #5

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

I don't understand why people confuse studying with getting a diploma. You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany

I think people are confusing two types of studying:

- Undergrad level: Reading stuff that other people have already summarized books/blogs/etc and digesting it a bit. These days you might not really need to go to school to do this.

- Grad level: "studying" as in researching. I'm not in the humanities but I'm assuming that becoming a leading expert in "Germany 300 years ago" is a lot easier when it's your full time job.

Most of the responses here seem to be assuming the first case, whereas the case that is "fundamentally impossible" without some support is the more nuanced synthesis you get from the second case. And in our current system, half the purpose of undergraduate classes is to subsidize the higher level research.

I don't mean to make value judgements on whether further synthesis of "Germany 300 years ago" is needed, but until we come up with a better system killing undergraduate courses in field X is also a huge blow to the research there.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#59

Post by dahart »

squokko wrote: post #54
dahart wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes really. The high school group also has a bottom third. It’s misleading to cherry pick one of them.

No, the bottom third of people who don't go to college don't ever consider going to college.

So, why does that make it a valid comparison? What data backs up this claim about not considering college (as opposed to chose not to)? The bottom third of people who do go to college don’t fare as well as the rest, and probably considered dropping out.

It’s simply not valid to compare the bottom third of college grads to the top, middle, and bottom thirds of high school grads. They only did that so they could say the college group’s income was lower, which is only true if you leave out most college grads. If you compared the bottom third of high school graduates to all degree holders, the ratio you’d get would be stark, with the college grads earning multiples more than the subset high school group.

It is valid to do what @brobdingnagians suggested, and look at the medians of both groups.

Re: Gen Z is giving up on college

#60

Post by AussieWog93 »

erfgh wrote: post #30
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…

Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted. The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.

>Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted.

As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked.

A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (who can own their own businesses and earn $250k+).

Yet when we're looking for a career for our kids, we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.

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