Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

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

#751

Post by wheelinsupial »

endisneigh wrote: post #531
light_hue_1 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made. Plenty of coding bootcamps have great placement rates and great salaries. For example, the median salary at Boston's Launch academy is $72k. The median salary for Fullstack Academy Grace Hopper in NY is $90k. https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf... https://static.s…

2. Your stats are incomplete- how many of these people already have degrees? What’s the breakdown between that and wages? What’s the median pay for college graduates who go into the same professions? 3. Not cheap compared to what exactly? College graduates generally get paid more money over the lifetime.

Not perfect, but it’s the only attempt I’ve seen to try and answer the question about pre-boot camp education.

https://www.coursereport.com/reports/2020-coding-bootcamp-al...

(Difficult to read on mobile)

This shows that 1% have no high school diploma, 5% have graduated high school and the remaining 94% have gone to or graduated from college.

15% have 1-4 years of college and no degree, 6% an associates, 55% a bachelor’s, 16% have a masters, 1% doctorate, 1% a professional degree.

Data from 2018,2019,2020 is collected from the surveys.

Average Wages: No college degree: $61,836 Associates: $57,762 Bachelor: $71,267 Masters: $74,774 Professional: $66,619 Doctorate: $83,250

Not clear if this is the first job only or if this includes the results of second and third jobs. There is a section showing average wages for first job is $69,079 and average wage for third job is $99,229.

Also 15% of the graduates have never been employed from the boot camps. (16% for 2018 grads, 15% for 2019 grads, and 37% for 2020 grads.)

There are a lot of other insights in there as well.

Unfortunately the reporting doesn’t generally show quantiles or other information about the spread in wages. There are a few results where mean and median are shown.

As it’s a survey and self-reported there are always going to be some limitations. If others have alternative data to offer up, please share!

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

#753

Post by cush »

rossdavidh wrote: post #53

As the father of a 16-year old, I can say that the current generation of teenagers has heard a lot more about the issues of college debt than previous generations did. Partly because it's a lot higher, partly because even if newsmedia doesn't report on it, there are enough adults out there saddled with it that they just hear about it from a relative or friend. It used to be a no-brainer; you go to college if you can.…

Exactly. 1M fewer people will be in poverty from student loan debt

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

#754

Post by hiptobecubic »

Terr_ wrote: post #745
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…

> but we should go by averages, not outliers. Or to be a little pedantic, by mean, not average. When Bill Gates walks into a dive bar the "average person" is temporarily is a billionaire.

Median?

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

#755

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kube-system wrote: post #748
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At what point in the past 50 years did we start expecting academic liberal arts institutions to start churning out people with vocational skills? These are entirely different things. The point where they started taking in about half of each rising generation as freshman instead of 5%.

And whose fault is that? It's the parents and advisors that said "go to college and you'll get a good job" when they weren't cut out for it (or didn't even want to do it). It's the voters who pushed for students loans "to give all of our students a chance". If you give people who aren't cut out to do something, a chance to do that thing, it's expected that more people will fail. We are now living with the predictable…

>And whose fault is that?

The universities were happy to take the money, from the elite-but-useless private schools to the underfunded but more practical public engineering colleges. Only changing the incentives will change the results.

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

#756

Post by coding123 »

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…

Reminds me of when a plumber was installing an RO system in my house, was swearing for half an hour about the PEX, then forgot to shut-off the lines while a PEX fitting fell off and poured 200 gallons of water on my crappy fake wood shaw floor causing it to ripple. He then claimed it was my condos fault for using PEX in the first place. Holy crap you can't be more right.

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

#757

Post by [deleted] »

endisneigh wrote: post #444
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#758

Post by asdff »

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.

In state tuition at public schools has still been reasonable all this time

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

#759

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

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.

The downvotes are warranted but being “piloted” over the internet is a really interesting idea. There was a similar idea in the Black Mirror Christmas special.

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

#760

Post by WalterBright »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #636
WalterBright wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is identical to what an firsty year teacher makes Education degrees and Journalism degrees rank near the bottom of pay. If you want a good starting salary, invest in a STEM major. Above all, google "starting salaries for major XXXXX" before picking one. Sheesh!

> She made $45k year one, and a year later is the director of marketing at her company making over $100k/yr If OP's daughter got a CS degree after two years she'd have made $0 and be $30k in the hole for state school tuition ($100k+ for private school). By my calculation she's $100k minus boot camp cost out of the hole. According to Google the median income for a bachelor's degree is $100k, which includes experienced…

The point is, don't pick a major, spend 4 years and $$$$$, and then complain that one didn't know what the starting salaries would be.
Post reply on HN