I still haven't seen a real analysis why college has become so f....ing expensive over the last decades. I find it hard to understand why this is being accepted.
More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the first two are problems colleges need to fix I think its more of a matter that we need to change our mindset about who should be attending college maybe some people would be better off going the trade school route.
Part of the problem is the social stigma of not having a college degree. Not sure how to fix that
It depends on the context: having a college degree is stigmatized in some places.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We're all within 7 or so years of age, except the boat repair who is considerably older. This isn't a contest IMO, we all do more than OK. But it's definitely not fair to say that college pays more than trades. Both have huge swaths of pay ranges, from effectively zero, to millions. But if you're optimizing for making as much money as possible, I'd argue you're doing it wrong anyways.
The details matter - 7 years is medical school and some residencies for example.
To not take into account the age is silly. And the entire point of the original post is arguing about earnings, so…
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#504"I never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
My biggest gripe is the astronomical cost and debt burden that has vastly outpaced inflation. The university system in the U.S. has been taken hostage by greedy interests that push all kinds of bullshit costs on to students and have lost sight of exactly why the university exists in the first place - to educate. Not to house, not to entertain, not to keep fit, but to educate those that want to learn. If universities would stop with the non-sense "campus life" and focus more on a their core mission (like universities in Germany, for example) they might not have ended up in this predictable mess.
This level of enrollment decline only means one thing for universities: Layoffs and shrinking budgets. You can't squeeze any more blood out of these students.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#505Good. The entire college infrastructure is junk. It probably has its place but no in its current iteration.
The onus for training needs to be put on the businesses themselves. This is better for everyone including the businesses themselves. Putting in training requirements and a probationary period where new hires have to meet a certain threshold or be let go. The individual can then decide how best to learn.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#506There 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…
A comment doesn't necessarily need to be accurate to reach the top, it could merely confirm the biases of enough people so they think "yeah, sounds right to me!"
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in my early 40s. I dropped out of university. I've been programming professionally, in a wide range of contexts and in various industries and niche markets, for over 15 years. I still deal with the stigma associated with not having a college degree. It's not as frequent today as it was when I was at year 1-5, but it still comes up often enough that I get the sense it will never go away.
Curious how it comes up? I’m 42 and dropped out at 16, and it has just never come up, nobody has ever asked me once. I’m not doubting your experience, just curious where our paths differed since it’s such a stark contrast. I’m not a programmer but worked in ops, then product management, then CPO. Maybe it’s something to do with that?
Possibly enterprise development. In my experience they are a lot more credentials driven then startups and boutique development firms. There are outliers like Microsoft, Netflix, Google. But you have a to be a truly outstanding developer without a degree rather than a pretty good one with a degree.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#508why bother? you enroll to a college, you collect a huge debt that the government is not going to cancel - they prefer to give money to corporations instead. covid-19 disrupted in-person education and it's not gonna away any time soon. at the same time there are plenty of crypto startups that don't give a sh*t about education and could be pretty lukrative
I always chuckle when someone on HN inevitably rails against education in a post with bad spelling, grammar, and expletives.
Expletives are a sign of creative intelligence.
Bad spelling/grammar are mostly just due to modern technology where people communicate differently. Those things aren't as important as they once were. You'll see "highly educated" individuals making the same mistakes.
Lastly, there's the possibility you're speaking with someone who is not a native English speaker. Obviously, with your high IQ you should have been able to consider that scenario though ;)
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#509There 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…
>3) College is way over priced. They claim graduates make 40% over their lifetime vs. non grads. JP Morgan Chase did a study two years ago that shows kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree.
Having a job before 18 and getting a bachelors degree are not mutually exclusive, in fact, recent data suggests that about half of all people attending undergraduate school are employed. I personally was employed by 16 and went to college at 18, keeping a job for the entire time to offset some of the costs.
I do agree that student loans are a heinous tool though, even moderate loans accrue huge interest during a formative time in your career and prevent you from saving for retirement during the vital years when your investments have the most time to mature.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lived in the U.S. my entire life, and I agree with you. Our culture somehow misses the fact that as a society we benefit from educated citizens. There's even a segment of the population that fetishizes ignorance as a virtue, and knowledge as leftist indoctrination. There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian gove…
Academia is a hostile environment for a right-leaning person. When less than 5% of professors identify as conservative, why would you gravitate to it, as a conservative? That's half the country, by the way. Maybe that has something to do with low engagement. Consequently, the institution suffers dramatically from its own groupthink. That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of e…
> how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.
I can agree with you on that.