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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

#871

Post by mcguire »

ren_engineer wrote: post #259
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…

>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? the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often…

"the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades"

Between 2008 and 2015 the number grew by nearly 50%.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.45.a...

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

#872

Post by danny_codes »

echelon wrote: post #217
taylodl wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Things are just going back to the way they used to be: higher education is for the elites. Once upon a time we understood that higher education was important for all and having a well-educated public was good for the Republic. Now that view no longer holds - the politicians have learned that their flim-flam doesn't work as well on a well-educated public and so they've been making cuts to higher education for the…

That's an interesting take, but I disagree. The reason colleges cost so much is that they've expanded their administration, facilities, and sports programs to soak up all of the available loan money. I went to a state school that focused on STEM. The acceptance rate was low, class sizes were small, and the tuitions were reasonable. The buildings dated from the 60's. We didn't have extensive athletic programs, and our…

It's just a market failure.

Student loans are government-guaranteed and cannot be absolved by bankruptcy. This IMO creates a perfect storm whereby under-informed teenagers can get massive loans they have no hope of repaying. Without the government/no bankruptcy components to this equation, the market would not support this kind of debt market.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix. There are two simple options (and probably many more complex ones):

1. Make it a free market. Make student debt absolvable by bankruptcy. Don't give government guarantees. Private loans will account for the viability of student's repaying those loans, while allowing bankruptcy helps ensure that unfair or predatory loans will be costly to the loan-issuer.

2. Make it a government service, like K-12. The government will actively manage the tertiary education market, thus making "the cost of college" a policy decision.

IMO the first one is not particularly desirable because it will limit college access to the upper socio-economic classes, further exacerbating wealth inequality and reducing social mobility. That leaves us with the second option, which is both straightforward to implement and has many case-studies abroad.

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

#873

Post by brewdad »

rootsudo wrote: post #571
emaginniss wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're way off on 3. You're saying that tuition alone at a state school costs $45k per semester, which would be $90k per year. This site says that the average in-state public school is ~$25k all-in for a year. That includes tuition, room and board, books and transportation. https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...

That is not accurate at all https://admission.ucla.edu/tuition-aid/tuition-fees 56k 9 months. https://www.ohio.edu/financial-aid/cost 34k 9 months 9 months is considered 2 semesters. per semester. wouldn't consider ohio personally though. but beats your average by a good 30%. Not sure where it can get cheaper than Ohio.

Did you misread your own cite? UCLA is $36k for 9 months for in-state students, not $56k. Ohio is $24k for in-state. Anyone looking at these schools out of state is either not paying full price, due to scholarships or other aid, or is not worried about how to pay for it (bank of mom and dad).

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

#874

Post by danny_codes »

thehappypm wrote: post #773

Expensive, but low tier, private schools are the problem. They’re all over the Northeast. Schools that cost as much as Harvard, with way worse financial aid, with worse programs than Rutgers. It’s a scam with a quad.

This is just a symptom.

College in America is an example of a market failure induced by government intervention.

Federal loan guarantees and special rules around student loans (critically, they are not absolvable via bankruptcy) have caused a distorted market, whereby the colleges are incentivized to compete with each other for these guaranteed loans. Remember the student is a child, likely 17. They almost certainly have never supported themselves financially, and almost certainly have no conception of what a $200,000 loan will look like 10 years down the road. So you have colleges who are _guaranteed_ to get $200,000 from these poor students. You'd have to be some crazy altruist not to exploit that!

However, imagine a world in which no such federally-guaranteed loans existed (and critically where absolvable by bankruptcy). In this case, no rational bank would loan a student 200k. The financials simply aren't there. Now students have to look around for funding options in the private market, which is only going to cut loans it believes will turn a profit: that is, loans to students who they believe will be able to pay them back.

We have built a flawed economic model here: it is guaranteed to fail. The only solution is to overhaul this market either via novel market design or via nationalization.

The choices of individual schools is mostly irrelevant: as market players, all they can do is play the game. The game is bad, and so the schools' decisions have bad outcomes.

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

#875

Post by danny_codes »

skrbjc wrote: post #606
abeppu wrote: post #449

The bizarre thing with higher education costs that no one's really explained to me is why schools simultaneously spend more and more on administrators (who are full time staff), and push more and more teaching to adjuncts. The claim I've heard justifying the growth of administration staff is that regulatory compliance becomes more onerous over time. But no school is judged on their regulatory compliance. In industry,…

It’s interesting because universities over-produce academics for the number of tenure-track jobs available, so they then hire those phds back into adjunct positions, which is often the only academic job available to them, especially if they don’t want to move across the country to some small college in the middle of nowhere. So many phds just suck it up and take the adjunct jobs teaching undergrads. Actual professors…

It does make you wonder though whether this spending is actually bad though. IE, does admin bloat improve university outcomes? If a PI has better resources, is their research output improved?

IMO the discussion focuses entirely on cost-to-student, which is of course important, but is possibly missing some important details. A doubling of productivity among research staff at a university like Cal would no doubt correspond to some insane GDP multiplier 20 years down the road.

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

#876

Post by yarpen_z »

atlgator wrote: post #583
spaetzleesser wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." With the forklift you will stay at 45k forever and probably make less every year whereas for the teacher this is a starting salary a…

I mean, ok, but let's not base our entire view on one trade, if you can even call forklift operation a skilled trade. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC techs all have upward mobility from apprentice to journeyman to foreman to owning their own businesses. Apprentice level electricians make about $75k in Alaska with zero experience. Foreman electricians managing commercial electrical jobs make about $175k. YMMV…

While I'm not denying the value of trade jobs, it feels like cherry picking. An electrician in Alaska? Wouldn't his salary be inflated by high COL? Couldn't be the case that most people don't want to live there, and skilled workers are hired by oil and gas industry that can offer high wages?

Foreman earning 170k - how many of them are there? Acsdemia is a really tough job market, maybe except for CS, and nobody claims that scientist is a great career because there are professors who make good living. After all, everyone knows how many PhDs and postdocs leave the academia because of lack of tenured positions.

If you're briliant and top 5%, then you're going to succeed in every job and every trade. The question is what kind of jobs are left to the 95%?

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

#877

Post by tmule »

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…

For someone who is finding holes in the OP’s reasoning, unfortunately, your linked post and statements lack rigor.

“ Average College grads make more money over their lifetime, period.”

There are huge selection effects in play. It is true that even after controlling for these effects, college has economic value. But the statement about making more money isn’t the right framing at all. There’s a whole chapter on this in the book called “Mastering metrics”. You might want to pick that up - it’s a coffee-table book for the quantitative-minded person.

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

#878

Post by alienalp »

You can't become a doctor without going med and there are many other degrees like that however for like Physics, maths, CS etc... collage is rather like a big club in its ways and it is not for everybody. Rather it is for very few people actually. In countries like mine people go to collage because job quality is seriously low. It is ridicules that in first comment someone complaints about forklift jobs pays as much as first year teacher. That is really what needed so the people who shouldn't be a teacher doesn't go to collage for economical reasons so people who should be a teachers become a teacher.

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

#879

Post by WoahNoun »

01100011 wrote: post #628
tempest_ wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to 1 A lot of the trades are hard on your body. By the time you are 45-50 your knees could be wrecked and that makes it hard to do service work like electric/HVAC. There are an argument that desk work isnt healthy either but that is a different discussion.

As a 46 year old I agree, but I'll say that most tradesmen I knew have either moved on to owning/managing or have switched careers. Overall they've done very well. Also, IME, tradesmen always have the nicest houses regardless of income because they or someone they can trade with will do top quality work for barely any compensation.

And what about all the 40-50 year olds who are on SSA disability because of 20-30 years of manual labor?

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

#880

Post by ethbr0 »

coding123 wrote: post #756
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…

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.

I'm of the firm opinion that residential tradespeople are the Law of Lemons at this point. If they were better: they'd be doing commercial.

Consequently, if you find someone who doesn't do commercial, beware.

Exception: someone over the age of 55 who continues doing skilled work as a "pro-hobby."

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