I'm sure this will cause Colleges to lower their admission price right... right?
More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#802There 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…
The purpose of college is partly workforce training but also just general education. To see college as solely providing competitive dollar careers seems to misunderstand a large part of higher educational purpose. In theory at least, the liberal arts are something far more than just "can I work at FB".
Which is why far fewer people should be getting them. The immediate needs of most people far outweighs the desire to learn about liberal arts.
Which is why these degrees were sold with the promise of good pay. If you want to blame someone for framing college solely from a wage earning potential perspective, point the finger at the people selling college degrees to kids.
There should not be guaranteed student loans for degrees that don't provide competitive dollar careers.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
And those that did, used the funds to build new campuses and cutting-edge programs. And students overwhelmingly chose to go to these more expensive and larger schools while smaller and more modest schools struggled to attract students.
I suggest you look at the ways universities ACTUALLY spend money. Yes, many, including my alma mater, spent lavishly on fancy new buildings. No question about that. But the primary growth of expenses at universities has been the huge growth in administrative positions. Administrators want to get paid more, and what better way to do that than to pretend you need more people working UNDER you. There is zero reason why…
Yes, of course, when people are at the door with a blank check, it's easy to waste too. I'm not saying these schools spend all their money wisely, I'm saying that people could choose to go to cheaper colleges but often don't, and choose schools that appear to have more resources.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. I fail to see how this is a problem, and whether it should be fixed. The very idea that people that went through college deserve more is insulting for tradespeople as well as the source of bad incentives to go to college. If anything, the society would probably benefit from colleges focusing on transmitting and advancing knowledge, rather than bei…
Fully agree, and the implication is that even fewer people should go to college.
Well, not necessarily.
College currently mostly exists as an early-life service, but alternative paths exist: in the US, people in the military can go to college later in life. In some countries, people can get college education at evening courses. We could envision that some people starting early in life in physically hard jobs may want/have to retire years earlier, and use that time to go through college our of personal interest.
This isn't really possible with an onerous college system mostly dedicated to social layering, but an university system with scholarships for everyone and flexibility in the time and way people enroll is not an impossible goal.
I for one would really like to return to university after I retire, for instance.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#805Earlier 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…
The study you linked is over 10 years old. Furthermore, it is using lifetime earnings as the core metric, which means they are pulling in data about people who earned their degrees like 50 years ago. All the data that currently exists shows better outcomes for students that go to college. One would expect this even if college had no benefit to students because the population of students that go to college is pre-sele…
I disagree, the overemphasis of anecdotes is why so much misinformation is running rampant these days.
Nothing is wrong with going to trade school or boot camp or whatever, or even just being a laborer.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#806There 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…
> 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.
For decades clueless counselors pushed kids that were not successful academically or with behavioral issues into "the trades"... Only for the kids to realize they do need good reading and academic abilities to be able to succeed as a skilled tradesman. And that it takes disciplines to work in those fields.
We keep hearing about the successful tradespeople (notice how they are all their own bosses and own their shops) who made it but not the auto-repair schools’ dropouts.
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#807Maybe it just got too damn expensive. I make pretty good money and I'm still planning carefully for how I'm going to deal with it for my kids (who still have 7-9 years left before college). I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus. Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids…
Aren't state colleges relatively affordable (while mostly OK academically)?
Yes and no. I used to work at a state university recently. The cost of most state universities (in my state) has stayed largely the same over the last 10 years. However state appropriations (tax dollars from the state government) has been going down each year. So students are responsible for more of the bill.
Back in the 70's and 80's state appropriations covered between 70-80% of tuition. Now my state covers roughly 35-40% of funding for most public universities [1]. Part of this is the university offering more programs - athletics, counseling, therapy, other student services, which all need additional funding. The other part is that state funding is going down due to a variety of political budget reasons.
[1]: https://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDF/Summaries/21h4400h2cr1_Educ...
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
The study you linked is over 10 years old. Furthermore, it is using lifetime earnings as the core metric, which means they are pulling in data about people who earned their degrees like 50 years ago. All the data that currently exists shows better outcomes for students that go to college. One would expect this even if college had no benefit to students because the population of students that go to college is pre-sele…
I disagree, the overemphasis of anecdotes is why so much misinformation is running rampant these days. Nothing is wrong with going to trade school or boot camp or whatever, or even just being a laborer.
Show me the study that shows that people in this thread are taking it personally. Or did you just rely on anecdotes to determine that?
Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#809There 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…
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Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Universities certainly have the incentive to take money when people are lining up to give it to them. I don't blame people for doing their job to grow their institutions.
You'd think students would be incentivized enough not to dig themselves into thousands of dollars in debt, but students are also incentivized by the wishes of their parents and the promises of a good future. Incentives don't have to be in someone's best interest to be motivating.