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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

#881

Post by pwn2d2 »

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…

> Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs.

My startup is trying to help this in the flooring industry. At https://gocarrera.com we have made a platform for contractors to connect to companies and vice versa. We will roll out a feature shortly for people unfamiliar with the industry to be and to find add join other contractor teams to help them get started in the industry. It's really exciting and pretty shocking how complex the industry is.

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

#882

Post by Gigachad »

nostromo wrote: post #338

Most comments here are completely missing why this is happening now. Students don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for remote learning. They could watch Khan Academy videos instead for free, and they’d be better quality.

While hiring for junior software devs, I found that degrees were next to worthless. People coming in with a long list of qualifications but somehow can't answer the most basic questions about the stuff they are certified in.

I found people who did self directed online learning combined with having some projects to show in the resume were the best and had real world experience rather than having memorized a hundred java design patterns from the 90s.

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

#883

Post by pingsl »

China is on the opposite, for example, there will be over 10 million college graduates in China in the coming summer.

However, Chinese graduates are in a similar situation as US college graduates.

It's hard to find a decent job with a college degree. The college degree was once the premium but now more like a baseline in many industrials. Now China wants to push more young men to go to the professional education track.

But the challenge is there are more issues in professional education than in college education here.

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

#884

Post by erik_seaberg »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #677
serverholic wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source on programming starting out female dominated? Also, I'm curious what a programmer's job looked like in the beginning.

I don't know of a solid source, but I've heard anecdotally that computer programming and operation roles in major corporations of the '60s and '70s tended to be dominated by women, partly because the kinds of tabulation and collation that big business wanted were extensions of existing secretarial work, but also for the more immediate practical reason that the average female office worker of the time was far more lik…

“Programmer” used to be the name of a job turning flowcharts into punch cards, because hiring someone to use a keypunch was much cheaper than computer time. They were replaced not by men but by compilers.

“Systems analyst” used to be the name of our job.

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

#885

Post by muslikcat »

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…

Yea, I am skeptical about top comment also. This is anecdotal, but I have a brother who is a welder w/ bunch of AWS certifications. For several years he worked at union and non-union shops here in Los Angeles. His experience is virtually the same in every shop - low pay (~$25-27/hr), physically challenging work, very limited vertical mobility. It was a sad struggle to observe from a position of someone w/ a FAANG job.

I ended up loaning $80K to him, so that he can open his own small welding shop. It is likely that money is gone forever without return. Even now with his own welding/metal fab business it is a constant struggle - winning bids inconsistently, short cash runway, $28/hr, can't afford to pay for his medical insurance, late night work to ensure new projects are coming in, abuse from general contractors who exploit small subcontractor welders, big boys clubs (small subs can't get those projects), etc.

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

#886

Post by lazyasciiart »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #741
tejtm wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds just like programming ... I know! let's invent object oriented welding to lower the barriers to being able to make a weld that holds.

If you're welding without regard for the objects or their orientation you're probably going to have a bad time.

It probably won't be proper functional welding either.

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

#887

Post by ChrisLomont »

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…

BLS lists median forklift driver salary around 37k. This is not starting, it's median. Starting is much lower everywhere I look. And forklifts are being automated by many companies right now.

Median starting pay for a 4 year degree is over $54k at the moment.

That's a massive difference.

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

#888

Post by ptero »

kube-system wrote: post #714
ptero wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big issue with making a no-college a viable option is that in the US the school education is absolutely atrocious. In many colleges the first year of science or engineering degree classes focus on providing a decent background that should have been taught at schools. This needs to be fixed for the school-only path to be viable.

Public schools in the US vary from "absolutely atrocious" to "absolutely great" depending on where you live. The colleges that select students only from the latter do not waste time re-teaching high school material.

I think I did not express myself well. The problem I was referring to with the schools is not that some teachers are better and some are worse, class features, etc. This matters, but there are bigger problems as US lacks a uniform school program. The selection of materials is done more or less at the teacher's discretion.

This means that even in the same school the math teacher for kids entering grade 8 does not know what material was covered before. Some kids may have been exposed to a particular topic, some may have never seen it. So teachers have to go over the basic material again and again and again, which makes it very hard to give a solid course.

In Europe (at least in some countries), there is a standard program, so the teacher in grade 8 math knows that all prerequisites have been seen by every student. So they give a very brief refresher at the beginning of the year and can turn to the new material. Even better, when a topic is covered in a physics class, the physics teacher knows that the corresponding math tools have already been covered in the math classes.

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

#889

Post by upbeat_general »

wil421 wrote: post #138
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…

Yes I can say the same in the US. My state paid full tuition for B average and above students if you went to a college in the state. After a little over a year I took off and went back to school while working at a later point. By that time I qualified for federal tuition aid but lost my state one. It wasn’t much over $20k for 5 years out of pocket for me.

What state does that? B average and above is probably ~50% of high school students so that’s full tuition for half of all high schoolers.

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

#890

Post by darepublic »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #626
subsubzero wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alot of engineers(and other tech employees) are forced out of the field due to ageism by 45-50 so its a wash.

Not unless they're dogmatic about the language they're developing in, they aren't. I ran into people ALL THE EFFING TIME as a recruiter who refused to train in another language or environment because they were going to make less money if they moved on, even as the market for their current skillset dwindled to nothing. That's a completely different issue from having injured your back or shoulder or knee so often that…

My neural network was ground down to a nub for a variety of reasons. I could not leave the cozy confines of this react and typescript stack until winter had ended
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