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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

#731

Post by fleddr »

Sure enough the American college system is rotten, but let's also shed some light on financial literacy. We'll use "Brian" from the article.

Brian can't be bothered to enroll into college because he's tired of remote learning.

Yes, remote learning sucks. Doesn't mean you should stop. I'm bothered by this optionality. Later in life you're going to do a lot of things that suck, but have to do anyway. Further, at such young age, I would expect some hawkish parent to "help out" with the choice, but I guess I'm old fashioned.

Fine, though. Delaying enrollment whilst earning some cash in the meanwhile is not the end of the world. And so Brian starts work at Jimmy's sandwiches.

Then comes his mastermind move: he starts work at an Amazon warehouse for slightly more pay, yet needs to buy a car to get there. For which he takes a loan.

I imagine many Americans don't even blink at this, but it's absolutely moronic. The very point of the break from school was to earn cash. Instead of saving it up, he's now in debt for the car, works a shit job, and comes short both for his "needs" and for college.

Brian seems to have some self awareness at this point:

"It's so hard," he says. "I'm just like, 'Wow, if I go to school, I'm going to take time off and I'm not going to have any money for things I need.'"

Yeah, Brian, Wow indeed. Typical for American consumer culture: spending above your means from the very start.

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

#732

Post by nsxwolf »

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.

Try pulling a broken cartridge out of a 20 year old shower faucet after the handle snaps off. I'll give you the pliers you need. You get one try and if you fail, you will now need the tools to remove tile or cut drywall, cut pipes, solder, etc.

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

#733

Post by ryanSrich »

sylens wrote: post #51
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.

Yes, it's quite clearly this. Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classe…

It’s mind boggling how bad student loans are looking back at it. It was just normal to spend $100k over 4 years.

I finally paid mine and my wife’s off in 2020 and when I did the math, combined we paid $216k over 7 years post college. We were both lucky enough to have well paying jobs, but so so many people don’t. Some of these people even with decent jobs will be paying $500-$1000/m for nearly the rest of their lives.

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

#734

Post by rurp »

HNDen21 wrote: post #698
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…

If you for example do some open source projects between 15 and 18 and then get a job after finishing high school.. by the time the other person graduates college you will already have 4 years of experience and be a mid level/senior developer.. so you have a start of 4 years in terms of money as well as experience We only look at college degrees for people without experience... for people that have experience, we don'…

This reminds me of some research I've seen supporting this effect. I can't remember the exact study but basically a large factory shut down putting a lot of people out of work, who were then offered free schooling to learn a new trade. After some number of years they looked back on those individuals and the ones who took the free training had actually done worse on average than the ones who had turned it down.

The effect seemed to be just what you're describing. Even though most of the non-schooling group got worse jobs to start, they had several years of lead time to build experience and get pay raises which ended up being more valuable than the certificate or degree the other group got.

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

#735

Post by shkkmo »

hooande wrote: post #662
lapsedacademic wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop this.... I question the statistical literacy... Ugh. Why? You asked for a statistically grounded conversation, so let's do that. Let's start, for example, with pdf page 25 (and surrounding context) of https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/causal_educ_earnings.p... The analysis done in that paper is a good starting point for a productive conversation. We could discuss the bounds on various coefficients and deci…

Section 3.6. "Family background" of the pdf you linked to discusses the impact that parent's educational attainment has on how much money someone earns as a result of going to college, not whether they attend college. It's not used as a control in a way that's relevant to this discussion. Do you have another study? Either way, it's a fact that parental income is the best predictor of future income. Not educational at…

> Either way, it's a fact that parental income is the best predictor of future income. Not educational attainment.

Sure, but they are interrelated factors and they way they effect the distribution is complicated. This study was linked elsewhere and does control for parent's income: (I didn't vet the methodology or data, just looking at what their reported results say.)

https://research.upjohn.org/empl_research/vol23/iss3/1/

One of the reasons that parental income is such a strong predictor of child income is because parental income has a strong effect on how much college will increase your income.

Interestingly enough, that effect is quite disparate based on more than just parental income.

The study says that low income whites see only a 12% boost to income from college while high income whites see a 131% boost to income from college. Interestingly, blacks show an even higher boost to income from college, 175%, and parental income had no statistically significant effect on this boost.

Also interesting is how those effects play out when you look at different parts of the income distribution. Parental income increases the average effect of college, but doesn't significantly affect the median effect. Thus a lot of the increase to the effect of college on average incomes [edit: for children of higher income parents] is from gaining access to the long tail of very high income outcomes.

So the answer is if you are a poor white male, college is far less valuable than if you are female, rich or black (in increasing order of college effect size.)

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

#736

Post by maccolgan »

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…

> 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?

Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.

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

#737

Post by [deleted] »

prirun wrote: post #697
welshwelsh wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#738

Post by suyjuris »

larkost wrote: post #421
zapataband1 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we I read somewhere that in Germany 60% of students go into trades and they have seriously beefed up their programs. But yeah there is a stigma here in the US about trades, I think that's partly due to the social consequences of having insane wealth gaps and worshipping billionaires.

Not only that, but depending on which state you are in in Germany (and Austria) you get routed at around 4th grade. If the teachers decide that you are academically fit for it then you go on to the Gymnasium, which prepares you for college, often with some focus for your class (e.g.: mathematics, arts, or science). If those same teachers decide that you are not up to college, but are still smart enough for something…

Distributing children of age 10 into groups based on their predicted future academic achievement works about as well as you would expect (i.e. not very well), but the redeeming feature of the system is that it is reasonably fluid and you can change tracks. You could, for example, do Abitur after completing Realschule and then move on to university. It is also possible to change directly from Realschule to Gymnasium at basically any point, if you meet certain standards. (You can also take university classes while in Gymnasium without too much trouble.)

There is also the Gesamtschule, which combines the three tracks (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) into a single school.

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

#739

Post by saghm »

nostromo wrote: post #338

Most comments here are completely missing why this is happening now. Students don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for remote learning. They could watch Khan Academy videos instead for free, and they’d be better quality.

I was surprised how low this theory was in both the article and in this comment section! The article even opens with talking about the trend continuing fall 2020 (the first school year that began since the shutdowns hit the US), and yet it takes almost halfway down the article to mention "remote learning" and then another big chunk before the word "pandemic" is used (I didn't see "virus" or "COVID" either before then). I'm not saying all the other issues discussed in the article and elsewhere in this comment section aren't there, but given the timeline I feel like any convincing theory has to first address why that isn't the dominant factor.
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