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

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

#671

Post by lumost »

atlgator wrote: post #583
spaetzleesser wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." With the forklift you will stay at 45k forever and probably make less every year whereas for the teacher this is a starting salary a…

I mean, ok, but let's not base our entire view on one trade, if you can even call forklift operation a skilled trade. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC techs all have upward mobility from apprentice to journeyman to foreman to owning their own businesses. Apprentice level electricians make about $75k in Alaska with zero experience. Foreman electricians managing commercial electrical jobs make about $175k. YMMV…

You are describing good Union work. Anecdotally these jobs appear tough to get into from family who work in various trades, in construction such jobs are tough to get into and tougher to hold onto ( eventually the work dries up as construction dwindles )

Unionized manufacturing does much better, with steady employment that can exceed 200/hr for the right work. These days you can pretty much only get such jobs via connection as they aren’t creating more of these jobs very frequently.

Source: The 200/hr figure was based on underwater welding for USN ships.

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

#672

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #215
samarama wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the issue is that you can get these loans regardless your program. Chemical engineering? Here you go. Studying gay romances in 14th century literature? Yup, here's your 50k too. One of those people can pay that loan off in two years. One of them is likely never going to pay it off without a career change. Of course, we probably don't want loan officers picking what poor people can major in either.

I'm an advocate for requiring career counseling before taking out student loans.

I would not say that people should be denied based on their chosen major, but prospective students should be shown statistics on the average salaries, unemployment, and usage rates of the major they're interested in and compare it to the projected costs and resulting loan debt.

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

#673

Post by selimthegrim »

lapsedacademic wrote: post #603
rootsudo wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not accurate at all https://admission.ucla.edu/tuition-aid/tuition-fees 56k 9 months. https://www.ohio.edu/financial-aid/cost 34k 9 months 9 months is considered 2 semesters. per semester. wouldn't consider ohio personally though. but beats your average by a good 30%. Not sure where it can get cheaper than Ohio.

> Not sure where it can get cheaper than Ohio. Apparently lots of places, since the national average is substantially lower than the Ohio numbers. But, more importantly, both UCLA and Ohio University are flagship R1s. Likely literally every other public university in Ohio is cheaper than OU, and I'd be unsurprised if UCLA is one of the more expensive public options in CA (wouldn't know, never lived in CA). e: sure en…

Ohio State is an R1. Ohio is an R2.

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

#674

Post by gunfighthacksaw »

watwut wrote: post #659
indymike wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Many trades also pay like crap and have a very limited window in which you can do it. I'm not sure what you mean by limited window unless we are talking about professional athletes and some categories of manual laborers. > In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e…

> This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles). As a woman who likes trades like manual work as hobby - a lot of those do actually depends on physical strength. At hobby level it does not matter that much, but to achieve actual commercial productivity is simply much harder without all those muscles.

When I did longshoreman for the summer there were but 2 women in the bull pen.

One was a heavier older lady, imagine a burly dinner lady and you’ve probably got her. The other woman was maybe in her 30s and looked trim, but she had arms gnarled like branches and you could see a six pack through her tshirt.

Mad respect for women who choose a profession like that, but it needs to be a lifestyle and it will consume you. As an untrained man with a normal (assumed) amount of testosterone, my body adapted over two shifts of swinging 70lb metal bars around.

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

#675

Post by ryanhuff »

HWR_14 wrote: post #130
bagacrap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The loans are exactly why the colleges were able to continue jacking up the prices. As with homes, people will pay as much as institutions are willing to loan them. In both cases the currently low interest rates allow the loan principal to be much higher (given that folks calculate cost based on recurring payments). If you remove the student loan system then tuition would become cheaper. However that does unfairly im…

It's not just loans, it's COVID. If I were college-age and I were planning on going to college I would certainly do one of two things. I would postpone college until the COVID issues died down -or- I would use the fewer applicants to get into a more prestigious school banking on a better 3 year experience (out of 4) starting in the fall of 2022 and more impressive degree going forward. Either way, I can imagine admit…

Prestigious schools are seeing record numbers of applications, and record low in acceptance rates. If there is a hit in college attendance, its not happening at the top of the food chain.

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

#676

Post by stocknoob »

ksdale wrote: post #534
stocknoob wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The GP thinks parents consider their child being a forklift driver vs teacher as equivalent outcomes if they pay the same?

Would you be ashamed if your child was a forklift driver? The world needs people to do useful things, and we shouldn't shame people for doing useful things.

No shame, I don’t care what people do as long as it doesn’t harm others. People should enjoy their lives.

But, many (most?) people are status-conscious and equal pay != equal prestige. College is primarily about opening doors to higher prestige.

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

#677

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

serverholic wrote: post #640
hardtke wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40…

Source on programming starting out female dominated? Also, I'm curious what a programmer's job looked like in the beginning.

I don't know of a solid source, but I've heard anecdotally that computer programming and operation roles in major corporations of the '60s and '70s tended to be dominated by women, partly because the kinds of tabulation and collation that big business wanted were extensions of existing secretarial work, but also for the more immediate practical reason that the average female office worker of the time was far more likely than her male colleagues to already be an experienced typist.

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

#678

Post by Eridrus »

commandlinefan wrote: post #226
ChicagoDave wrote: post #28

I have 3 college-aged kids and one nearly there. Their universal concern is the cost. It has become prohibitive. Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy. If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.

> 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…

There is a lot of defeatism floating around these days that isn't really warranted, there's good evidence that what you study matters as much as where, e.g. https://www.air.org/news/press-release/when-it-comes-your-pa...

Barely scraping through an engineering degree or getting a degree in architecture at texas tech is certainly a bad idea, but the average engineering graduate is doing better than the trades.

More of this data is public now on graduate outcomes, e.g. https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/texas/texas-tech-univ...

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

#679

Post by balls187 »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #151
_fat_santa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought it's not as glamorous as a 4 year college experience, I highly suggest going to a Community College for the first two years and then transferring to a state school. I did this and through I resented it at the time, I existed college with around $30k in student debt versus my friends that all has something in range of ($40k to $80k). IMO 30k in student debt is very manageable, currently have the thing paid dow…

If you happen to live near a decent community college, this isn’t a bad idea. But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college. So the savings isn’t quite ideal. I actually went to community college instead of a senior year at high school, and think you should really inspect the quality of the pro…

> But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college

This was the case for me, though I wouldn't classify as being "screwed."

I attended a private tech school, and they were upfront they would not accept credits for any engineering program pre-reqs (Math, Chem, CS, Tech Comm, etc). However, they would accept "humanities" credits an apply them to any electives required for our chosen degree.

Luckily, I had participated in our schools "running start" so I earned those credits while in high school, and my only intention of taking math at the time was to fulfill my highschool math requirements. I did also take 2-years of mandarin, which my school gladly accepted and counted towards my electives.

All that being said, in Washington state, all publicly funded schools must accept all credits from Community Colleges, AND guarantee admission, so if you are a student looking to attend a state school in Washington state, community college is a very attractive route.

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

#680

Post by beepbooptheory »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #108

This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing , right? America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there. Com…

There is little hope anymore for actual advancement anyway, just a tendency downwards, punctuated by small spurts of different kinds of enthusiasm.

We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling.

How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles.

The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore

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