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Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#791

Post by saint_fiasco »

nashashmi wrote: post #122

Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money. Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years. My math comes out to the college grad is still making more m…

What if you fail for whatever reason and don't finish college? Then you spent a bunch of time and money for essentially no benefit.

College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.

The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#792

Post by gishh »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #715
timmytokyo wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see very little evidence for this abundance of American "common wisdom". If anything, America has always had a deeply anti-intellectual vein running through it, whether it was the Scopes monkey trial, the Know Nothing Party or what you see in the present political scene. Higher education, especially the affordable kind at public universities, has been a bulwark against the paranoid delusions that often dominate soc…

Huh? Little evidence? Prosperity in America was built by millionaires that drove 20 year old white pickup trucks (because base color was $100 cheaper). They were very "common wisdom". Almost all had to understand and operate within the commodities markets(where reason and empiricism meet head first with humanism and human behavior), head multi million dollar organizations, negotiate multi million dollar deals, and tr…

Don’t climb that ladder and eat that food! We will beat you!

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#793

Post by gishh »

I graduated high school in 2005. I had been making and running websites and forums (phpbb anyone?) since 1998…ish?

I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere.

As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions.

I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#794

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

qcnguy wrote: post #771
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When SCOTUS found against the power company they sent a clear message that merely being a technical, safety-critical job was an insufficient basis to establish a need to test people for intelligence. That's your interpretation. The court regarded the test used the power company as unrelated to the demands of the job. You're welcome to disagree with the court about that (as the company probably did), but don't misre…

I didn't claim otherwise. It should however be self evident that courts have no solid basis on which to make such a call. Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter. This is why human rights laws are always terrible in practice. They require the courts to make decisions well outside the bounds of their expertise.

> Judges don't know anything about running power plants, hiring employees, or really anything on that matter.

This is why both parties hire the best lawyers they can, and the best expert witnesses, to make the case for their side. We cannot require that every decision in the world be made by experts in the decision domain - sometimes they have to be made by people we've entrusted to make decisions (and in particular, decisions intended to be guided by the law).

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#795

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

ghaff wrote: post #732
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more. However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's v…

Another major feature of Risk (more or less whatever side rules you're playing with around alliances and so forth) is the role of the cards which pretty much dominate everything else in the endgame.

Yep, and the endgame can last for hours longer than the rest of the game. That's when the remaining players get to argue and hate each other,

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#796

Post by corimaith »

potato3732842 wrote: post #538
maxglute wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in terms of raw productivity In terms of dubious financialized metrics of productivity, i.e. debt + fx driven growth. Which is valid indicator, but also the same inflated indicator that suggests 2025 tertiary that cost 200% 1980 tertiary (income/inflation adjusted) is somehow more productive and not parasitic. The entire problem is spreadsheet doing gangbusters is dependenant on increasingly inequitable CoL extract…

Exactly. In a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP. In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP. Ha…

You can build as many electric cars as you want, it's not going to resolve 8 hour workday or the cost of living crisis or the housing crisis. All of that is a social coordination problem, and the tools to resolve that will emerge from the humanities and the finance industry, not hard engineering.

Furthermore, people want those white-collar jobs you detest, and not everyone is inclined to R&D as this forum might think. The real problem is how technological progress has not been properly applied to improving white-collar productivity as opposed to just filtering, funnily enough of which this very thread is about regarding university.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#797

Post by swydydct »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #788
maxlybbert wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.

Having taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a differe…

Yeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#798

Post by thatfrenchguy »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #272
RomanPushkin wrote: post #233

Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.

Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.

It's not free, but because of its unique market shaping power, the government is often the best & the cheapest way to do things like education or health care, because it has no incentives to spend money on bullshit to raise prices.

That's why there's a harpist in the hall in fancy hospitals in the US and not at Necker in Paris, or why the administration at universities in the US is multiple times the size you'll see in France. Market shaping incentives.

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#799

Post by amrocha »

ReflectedImage wrote: post #722
potato3732842 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is still $5K more _economic_ value created, in that +$5K went to people who might otherwise be jobless. They'll in turn spend that money at businesses in the private sector, reaching more people, and so on. If the man with the septic tank runs a coffee shop, he will see extra value from more coffee sales. That's the grade school analysis and in reality we are all poorer for it. If ten people pay $5k to avoid g…

Ahh the bad high school maths take, which doesn't account for the risk. People don't just build 1 thing for a house nor can they afford a $20k failure. If you take Fred who saves up $10k for a major purchase for his house each year. If there is a 10% chance of a failure, then Fred will have a 53% chance of bankruptcy in 7 years. You can't run an economy where everyone is bankrupt.

Calling out people for “bad high school math” when you can’t even write a coherent sentence is pathetic.

A man saving 10K per year goes bankrupt if he doesn’t spend it productively? That’s what you’re trying to say?

Re: Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

#800

Post by amrocha »

hollerith wrote: post #668
rayiner wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.

The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.

If all US internet companies stopped existing tomorrow the world would be no worse off for it.

The internet infrastructure is great. Networking hardware is great. Private internet companies built on top of it? Big whoop

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