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Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#561

Post by numbsafari »

markus_zhang wrote: post #504
numbsafari wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so? Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.

Yeah that’s true. But a paid education doesn’t provide too much motivation anyway. College education is stuffed with unnecessary courses not everyone needs but you have to take anyway. Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).

I didn’t take a single unnecessary course.

The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#562

Post by jswelker »

haritha-j wrote: post #280
jswelker wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipelin…

Vague isn't the word I would use to describe Trump's anti immigration gestures.

True, but with respect to the university visa system at least it is pretty vague. The ICE stuff is not targeting Chinese and Indian uni students.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#563

Post by amanaplanacanal »

somenameforme wrote: post #509
artursapek wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?

Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.

Do you think Ukraine has more casualties than Russia? Or is it simply that Ukraine had a smaller population to begin with?

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#564

Post by jswelker »

vasco wrote: post #311
jswelker wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipelin…

> have created financial crises at most universities Those multi-billion dollar endowments are fine man, don't worry about them, they're not running out.

I'm not talking about Ivy schools. I mean regional state and private schools that educate the majority of people who attend college. These do not have multi billion dollar endowments unless you are summing them all up.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#565

Post by amanaplanacanal »

pfdietz wrote: post #463
the_gipsy wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.

Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question. Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military. I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obli…

I don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#566

Post by gedy »

immibis wrote: post #507
lurk2 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the rat…

Is this a problem? We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias, which are things the Republican party overtly rejects. We could expect that Republicans might not make it to universities as often, or they might not want to attend, or they might cease being Republicans upon learning facts and logic. None of this would be surprising and none of this would necessarily be a problem by itsel…

> We expect universities to have a pro-truth, pro-reality, pro-knowledge bias

And yet they are far from that. Lots of finger-in-ears, "la-la-la-I can't hear you" behaviour from universities in US/west past decade for sure.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#567

Post by jswelker »

hfsdhkdshksdhk wrote: post #371
jswelker wrote: post #102

Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…

Funnily enough there is a parasitic vine in Australian rain forests that kills its host and then thrives. It grows completely around the tree and creates its own trunk on the outside. The tree underneath eventually cannot get any nutrients in its sap and dies. The vine then feeds on the tree as it rots away on the inside. Eventually you have a hollow tree.

Very apt metaphor for the current situation.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#568

Post by nicoburns »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #541
nicoburns wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it misses what incredible alchemy comes from making people who come in for “job training” (like I did) spend 4 years in close proximity with research, academic freedom, liberal arts, and at least an attempt at some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive. For me it was the opposite. I came into college full of academic curiosity, and left completely burnt out by a system that cares ab…

If you can't prove knowledge gained, would that not indicate that the pursuit was fruitless? Regardless of your endpoint in that pursuit, you should have gained intermediate foundational knowledge along the way, even if you haven't arrived at your endpoint. If you cannot show mastery of that intermediate knowledge, then any kind of journey for knowledge would have failed.

"if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#569

Post by fintechjock »

nkrisc wrote: post #536
apparent wrote: post #288

The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings. And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Other…

> Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less. They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less. I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them. So even if the expe…

Correct.

It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#570

Post by ta20240528 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #464
seec wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities. By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals. A tr…

Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information. This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context. The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture o…

The chemistry department teaches culture? nonsense.
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