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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

#721

Post by jeremy_wiebe »

indymike wrote: post #314

There 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…

> 4) Student loans are a horror that needs to stop. Young people should not be put in debt-bondage. Imagine America's financial health if we let young people start families and careers debt free.

Nobody has forced anyone to take a student loan. In fact, many young adults would probably learn a lot about life, financial management, and restraint if they saved for college and waited till they could afford it instead of going straight to college and going into huge amounts of debt. Generally society doesn’t condone going into debt carelessly in other situations so I don’t understand how we give (or want to give) students a free pass for racking up thousands (or hundreds of thousands) in loans.

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

#722

Post by polygotdomain »

granshaw wrote: post #334
jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #328

Earlier 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

My degrees are not in CS related fields at all (both in Architecture). I know that just being able to "check the box" has gotten me in the door. Only a small handful of the places I've interviewed with over the last 10+ years have cared that my degrees weren't in CS. In some cases I've corrected them, "no, building architecture, not software architecture", and no one's seemed to care.

While you don't have to have a degree to get into tech, having one certainly makes things easier

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

#723

Post by chickenpotpie »

strict9 wrote: post #31

This is a good thing. Too many people are entering college and taking on enormous debt to get something which is less of an edge for getting a job. Worse, many get saddled with debt and don't finish for various reasons. Meanwhile tuition and books keep skyrocketing as schools divert more of their attention away from academics and toward more profitable uses of institutional time and capital. But in a bit of good news…

Strongly disagree, a less educated society is nothing to celebrate. This isn’t a problem being solved, it’s a country giving up.

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

#724

Post by thorsten11 »

spullara wrote: post #712
prirun wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the benefits of office jobs is that you get high pay, stable hours, relatively low stress and get to work in an air-conditioned room. So I would still prefer that over skilled trades even if the pay was the same. One of the downsides is your job can be easily outsourced to a country with lower wages, and with remote work here to stay (IMO), that is going to be even easier than before. There are no remote plu…

If we can get AR/VR into the mainstream I bet there will be remote plumbers that essentially pilot you to diagnose and fix things.

I guess all the tools in his pickup is not needed then?

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

#725

Post by pb7 »

nfw2 wrote: post #718
pb7 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Trades are overwhelmingly what people do when they don't go for a BA, and often have houses and children far before college graduates. Having a house and children as soon as possible isn't a win. It's what happens when you lack imagination. There's so much more to life than pumping out kids at 21 in your 3/2 in fly over country.

Having children as soon as possible may not be a win, but having a house surely is. How could owning a valuable and necessary asset not be considered a win?

Because owning a house makes you reluctant to move to pursue great life opportunities, some of which are career based that would earn you more money over your lifetime. Of course that has changed with the adoption of remote work but let's be honest, no one saw that coming.

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

#726

Post by jjtheblunt »

Since statistics statements can look very misleading, I kneejerk-thought

"it could be there are fewer people and thus students, due to population growth slowing or reversing, or it could be it's unaffordable or unpromising?".

I hope it's from slowed population growth, but suppose it's the cost.

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

#727

Post by cosmodisk »

silisili wrote: post #471
endisneigh wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re 1, at least in the US, it's very dependent on market and path. I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor. If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a…

This is what some people call a never getting old story of a builder who arrives to fix up your house in a Ferrari. It's a myth. Sole traders are sole traders. Some will pull in more,some will do less. Fantastic incomes aren't happening that often. If they start employing people- that's a business, exactly the same as if some dev would get a bunch of others under his ltd corp.

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

#729

Post by rurp »

sjostrom7 wrote: post #580
rurp wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kids that had a job, any job before age 18 make 35% more than their peers over their lifetime regardless of degree. I'm surprised by the magnitude but I can see why this would be the case. Working teenagers probably correlate with having parents who value work. Plus it teaches some valuable skills early on. An entry level job can throw all sorts of uncomfortable challenges at you, which you are expected to handle i…

You're probably also more able to work if your folks make enough money to have a stay-at-home parent (so you don't have to watch your younger siblings), buy you a car to get back and forth from your job, etc. Without seeing how they actually did this study, I'll go ahead and chalk most of this up to generational privilege.

Hmmm I'd want to see some data on this before drawing any conclusions, because my anecdotal experience is the opposite. The poor teenagers I knew pretty much all had jobs, in large part because they needed the money. Their only option to be able to buy new clothes or a used car was to earn the money themselves. Well off kids didn't have that same sort of pressure.

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

#730

Post by zzbzq »

welshwelsh wrote: post #655
silisili wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1, at least in the US, it's very dependent on market and path. I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor. If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a…

I'm sure there are some pipefitters who make a lot of money, but we should go by averages, not outliers. The average for "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters" is $56,330 per year, according to the BLS. For "Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers" it's $110,140 per year. For "Physicians and Surgeons," it's $208,000 per year. We also need to consider that running your own business is a lot of…

There's a lot of misleading information out there. On this site I once saw a carpenter say he was making more than he used to make as a $300k software developer. But I had some carpenters working for me and somehow I figured out they made around a tenth of that. In reality some of the outliers making a ton of money are wearing many hats as sales/marketing people, employing and managing subcontractors and employees, perhaps running their own website and SEO, and to truly get the gravy train running they nail some big sale where they sell some huge contract for an overpaying corporate client.
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