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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

#811

Post by hobbyjogger »

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.

Not affiliated but this AR tech seems promising:

https://carear.com/

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

#812

Post by betwixthewires »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #461
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…

> I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success. The cost of US schools is a massive p…

This is an important point that isn't being made enough in this thread. Must we all trade our youth for what amounts to a cost sunk fallacy that commits us to a path we may not even like?

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

#813

Post by a9h74j »

subsubzero wrote: post #573
RC_ITR wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a political meme that welding is the key to everyone getting a middle class lifestyle, because good welders get paid a good amount. The joke ofc being that there is a 'shortage' of welders because it's actually very hard to become a good welder. If, somehow, we got a bunch of people to become really good welders, it would just go to being a low paid profession.

its very hard to be become a good welder and it usually takes about a decade to master that craft, so 10 years gone. Very similar to medical school except you are making money during that decade instead of paying it to schools and residency.

And you can fail to get a residency even after $300K to get through medical school.

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

#814

Post by bsder »

snomad wrote: post #590
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…

> without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive. UCLA is 13k per year, *if* you are from California. Classes are likely impacted (even upper division) so even if a person goes to UCLA just for the last 2.5 - 3 years they could easily owe > 30k The real cost - rampant corruption (in california, if they ever opened the books on the non-profit entities it would be a major stunner and awakening…

You don't have to go to UCLA or the UC system.

You can also go to the Cal State system. SDSU, for example. You can also put in two years at a community college and then transfer across.

Graduating from an ABET accredited engineering school is just fine.

Pitt and CMU engineers used to have this debate back at Westinghouse and the general consensus was the primary difference between the engineers was 10 years extra to pay off your student loans.

> - rent seekers like Pearson and Mcgraw Hill (fun fact, did you know the 2 joined forces to run a company called Follets that runs most campus bookstores (how is that allowed?)

This makes me furious. ALL of the universities I know lost their really nice bookstores that you could browse through.

The problem is that the bookstore has two spikes of book profitability and the rest of time the books are a waste of space. That's "inefficient"--so everybody outsourced and now the "campus bookstore" is just a gift shop with a small wing to shuffle online book orders at the beginning of the term.

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

#815

Post by prawn »

tapatio wrote: post #766
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…

"It's nearly impossible to even get people to come out for normal household jobs anymore" Yup, residential clients are bottom feeders - avoid them at all costs - nothing but a hassle. The good money, and work, is with commercial clients.

What then should a residential client do? (Assuming they haven't yet found "their electrician" that they have rapport with.) Get a recommendation, overpay if necessary, pay promptly, then hope they'll take your call and not overquote next time?

Two of my tradies (painter and gyprocker) I actually found by having them do work at my office building, and then contacted them for work at home.

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

#816

Post by boomboomsubban »

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.

The average and the mean are the same thing.

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

#817

Post by hooande »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #595
zip1234 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in a house loan they will check your income and job before giving you the loan. For college they will give anyone a loan for an immense amount of money without verifying anything.

The problem comes in when you try to verify someone's ability to repay the loan. It's not just one's choice in major — for example, the graduation rate for Historically Black Colleges & Universities is only 35%. There are significant deltas between GPA, test scores, and college success rates between various ethnicities. Further, there are significant differences in the repayment of student loans between various ethni…

No post body was provided.

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

#818

Post by anm89 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #247
ravenstine wrote: post #140

Most of the college graduates I know ended up not using their degree because they majored in something no one cares about like communications, philosophy, journalism, etc. Maybe some people are figuring out that flipping burgers or literally just hanging out at home is a better use of their time from a financial standpoint than spending 4 or more years taking various prerequisites to get a degree that only results in…

>something no one cares about like communications, philosophy, journalism, etc. Excuse me? No one cares about fields that employ 2.8 million workers [BLS.gov 2020] ? No one cares about work that provides information, entertainment, and shapes political views? FYI your doctors, lawyers, and politician's biggest expense line items usually include money going to communications and media professionals. I and many others…

this type of discourse doesn't belong on HN. you should take it somewhere else.

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

#819

Post by KarlKemp »

nfw2 wrote: post #763
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…

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…

You acknowledge that the data is rather clear on this: education is well correlated with income: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2020/data-on-display/educa...

And while I have sympathy for your story, it isn't much more than what you want to be true. As an example: even a rather stupid medical doctor will tend to earn a lot of money. So, assuming you are capable of getting the degree, it will likely pay well.

Another large group goes into teaching, where income is also set mostly by your degree and tenure, not individual skills.

None of that is definite. I'm just trying to show how you can spin a story either way. But refuting the data which is clear on this across time and many countries requires more than a good story.

The question why you'd want to believe that is rather natural, as are your emotions. The mythological welders with 6-digit incomes are a staple on HN, so it isn't really unusual. I guess it's part of a cluster of attitudes best described as anti-elitism.

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

#820

Post by issa »

samarama wrote: post #319
issa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in the US and know people who are aged 30-50 and not software engineers, this is almost all that they talk about. Some people manage to pay them off, others (due to high interest) owe more than when they started. It is a huge problem.

Do you have sources for this, because the numbers don’t reflect this.

Obviously I don't have statistics on the people I talk to at that age, but to get a sense of the scope of the problem, 6,100,000 people are behind on payments. https://educationdata.org/how-many-people-have-student-loans
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