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Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

nytimes.com

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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#71

Post by awillen »

jawzz wrote: post #31
DC-3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they’re all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or artist who gets discouraged from study because “just do CS so you can make money” or “just go to the library it’s literally the same thing as four years of training under experts in the field and discussion with other smart young people.”

Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc., maybe, but still not great odds.

It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#72

Post by akhilcacharya »

jawzz wrote: post #60
akhilcacharya wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much worse off is someone going to UMass by your calculation?

Not the OP, but as I’d say that subjectively speaking, you’re better off going to MIT, but only if you have the passion and drive to succeed at a place like that (which you probably do if you got into MIT). But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects. Wha…

Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1 public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed am I?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#73

Post by akhilcacharya »

lumost wrote: post #67
akhilcacharya wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much worse off is someone going to UMass by your calculation?

Umass opens doors, MIT opens more - in 2010 when I graduated, my friends who went to MIT and did ok landed at 90k/yr in comp-sci fields, my friends from Umass who did ok made 40-70k in comp-sci fields. Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt…

Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1 public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed am I?

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#74

Post by minikites »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #48
minikites wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then why do we have formal education at all?

To create workers for the industrial revolution.

Formal education predates the industrial revolution.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#75

Post by Miraste »

Jtsummers wrote: post #51
minitoar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.

And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)

High school standards in the US have reached a point where I would not trust someone with only a high school diploma to be able to do data entry. Bachelor's degrees aren't a perfect credential but they're a passable filter, in lieu of building a much more extensive hiring process for low-level jobs.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#76

Post by Jtsummers »

minitoar wrote: post #66
Jtsummers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind. (NB: Talking about in the US)

Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.

It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#77

Post by borski »

colinmhayes wrote: post #55
borski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Plenty,” sure. But not a majority or anything. The median family income in the US is something like 68kb

What about the median income of people who attended college?

"For 25- to 34-year-olds who worked full time, year round in 2018, higher educational attainment was associated with higher median earnings. This pattern was consistent from 2000 through 2018. For example, in 2018 the median earnings of those with a master’s or higher degree ($65,000) were 19 percent higher than the earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree ($54,700), and the median earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree were 57 percent higher than the earnings of high school completers ($34,900)."[1]

None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy' category.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cba.pdf

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#78

Post by brighton36 »

awillen wrote: post #71
jawzz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they’re all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or artist who gets discouraged from study because “just do CS so you can make money” or “just go to the library it’s literally the same thing as four years of training under experts in the field and discussion with other smart young people.”

Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc., maybe, but still not great odds. It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playin…

That probably has more to do with 'greatness' as a product of the publishing system. (Meaning: it's great because it's published in a prestigious medium, not because the content is inherently superior) The next plato will likely be completely uncelebrated in these mediums, and will publish on an uncelebrated website or publisher.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#79

Post by borski »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #68
borski wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iirc, it was even lower when I went. And this is probably the most common mistake I see made about MIT, etc.; the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top schools runs deep , which simply isn’t as true for smaller or less popular schools. Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops…

> the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top schools runs deep, I think you're confusing depth and breadth. It's like the Harbor Freight coupon. Everyone gets 20% off with a few exclusions. But the people paying less than 80% (to continue the Harbor Freight metaphor) are few and far between.

No, I understand precisely what you're trying to say. Based on my (admittedly anecdotal) experience applying to colleges and working (however briefly) in Financial Aid at MIT, it was not a 20% blanket by any stretch; each case was treated individually and there was an explicit focus on ensuring students were not saddled with insane amounts of debt.

There were exceptions, particularly for wealthy folks and people who were 'on the line' income-wise, but the majority got significant financial aid.

Just to give you an idea, from MIT's stats[1]:

* Average need-based MIT scholarship: $47,593

* Students awarded a need-based MIT scholarship: 59%

* Students attending tuition-free: 31%

* Class of 2019 graduates with no student loan debt: 76%

* Average student loan debt for those who borrowed: $23,226

The trope that the expensive schools are the cause of the massive student loan debt problem is just that; a trope. When only 24% of the class graduates with any debt at all, I'm not convinced MIT (and similar) are the problem. This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.

[1] https://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#80

Post by gruez »

awillen wrote: post #28
DC-3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university. Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of e…

>Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine.

can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)

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