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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

#891

Post by somenameforme »

Ray20 wrote: post #857
hylaride wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukra…

> Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues The scariest thing is that even in the best-case scenario, this may no longer be possible. Even before the war, Ukraine's demographics were dire, then young people left, and no matter how the war ends, there's no objective reason for them to return.

It depends on what happens. If Europe/US just shrugs and moves onto the next thing after the war, which is probably the most likely outcome, then yeah. But there is a real chance that they try to go full Marshall Plan with the goal of weaponizing Ukraine. If so, then there's going to be a lot of money flowing about there with some big opportunities.

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

#892

Post by somenameforme »

tim333 wrote: post #600
somenameforme wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border. If Mexico agreed to this, it would take approximately 0 seconds before the US invaded them under some whimsical pretext (drug gangs probably) and overthrew their government to prevent this. In fact this is, more or less…

I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted. It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.

It's not about missiles in this case. That's a strategic battle that Russia has largely already lost, though the advent of highly capable ICBMs/MIRV/etc with hypersonic maneuvering also makes vicinity less relevant in modern times. In this case it's about a land route for invasion and subsequent logistics. There are already NATO countries bordering Russia, but the land between them is extremely unfavorable - swamps, forests, and so on. It's simply not fit for what would be a large scale conflict.

Invasion into Russia would ideally go through Belarus, which is part of the reason that Belarus is such a critical ally for Russia, and now even hosts their nuclear weapons. Since that's not possible, the second best route (and third and forth and...) is through Ukraine, likely towards Kursk or Belgorod.

There's even something of an equal but opposite here on NATO's side - the Suwalki corridor [1]. It's a narrow stretch of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad (a Russian exclave) that, if controlled, would cut off the Baltic states from NATO. So if war ever breaks out between NATO and Russia, it would be a key strategic point and unsurprisingly, it's been heavily fortified by NATO - there are even hundreds of American troops there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap

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

#893

Post by Suppafly »

apparent wrote: post #318
Suppafly wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.

> average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely This is far from true when you consider the selection bias of who goes to college, and the sheepskin effect.

Doesn't the so called sheepskin effect literally just reflect this fact?

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

#894

Post by somenameforme »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #563
somenameforme wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.

Do you think Ukraine has more casualties than Russia? Or is it simply that Ukraine had a smaller population to begin with?

I think this is impossible to answer for now. All you can do is look at known data and draw probable conclusions with an extremely high degree of uncertainty. So what do we know for certain about each side and the current state of the war?

Russia: Invaded with less than 200k soldiers. They later on mobilized approximately 300k soldiers. This mobilization was extremely unpopular and resulted in mass resistance within Russia, Russians emigrating and so on. Since then they swapped entirely to a 'voluntary' system of deployment, with some reported incidents of coercion. Benefits for soldiers are extremely high which is likely driving a significant rate of enlistment. Soldiers are demobilized after their contract ends, which is a very important issue for a war entering into its 4th year.

Ukraine: Had approximately 300k soldiers before the invasion. After the invasion they closed their borders, prevented men of 'fighting age' from leaving, and declared a general mobilization so that anybody between the ages of 27-60 could be forcibly conscripted and deployed to fight. They have carried out this mobilization very aggressively as well as constantly lowered the minimum age, and standard, of mobilization in a country that already had a severe demographic crisis before the war. Demobilization is somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent.

Current: Both sides seem to agree that Russia has a significant manpower advantage with an army of approximately 700k soldiers remaining in Ukraine.

---

To even begin to create comparative casualty measures you need to create estimates for how many soldiers Russia was able to 'voluntarily' enlist and estimates for their contract length to account for demobilization. And then you need to contrast this against how many people Ukraine was able to conscript and mobilize. You can find numbers for these online, but nobody's even pretending to try to be remotely objective and there's highly organized propaganda abounds, so the numbers are completely meaningless.

And then on top of that you also need to somehow figure out how many are actual casualties and how many are desertions. For instance Ukraine has apparently filed more than 300,000 criminal cases over desertion. Of course they also have numerous major motivations to avoid KIA classifications. So basically yeah - you're not going to be able to realistically estimate casualties on either side, with anything even resembling a reasonable degree of confidence, until the war is over.

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

#895

Post by bojangleslover »

weakfish wrote: post #686
bojangleslover wrote: post #498

Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down. No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare. [1] https://educationda…

Can we name this "HN's Law," where any thread remotely related to economics will have someone attributing everything to supply and demand?

Does that invalidate the point?

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

#896

Post by mopsi »

somenameforme wrote: post #892
tim333 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think Ukraine wasn't primarily about Russia's military security though. I mean the US/Nato could stick missiles in Estonia if they wanted. It may have been about political security. If Ukraine which is basically at least part Russian had become a prosperous democracy on Russia's doorstep it would make it harder for Putin to justify his autocracy. In fact that one may come to pass.

It's not about missiles in this case. That's a strategic battle that Russia has largely already lost, though the advent of highly capable ICBMs/MIRV/etc with hypersonic maneuvering also makes vicinity less relevant in modern times. In this case it's about a land route for invasion and subsequent logistics. There are already NATO countries bordering Russia, but the land between them is extremely unfavorable - swamps,…

The idea of an invasion of Russia from Europe is utter nonsense and completely detached from reality. Tell it to Russian military experts and you will get sighs and eyerolls in response. Not even Russian military exercises like Zapad simulate such a scenario. On the ground, the border remains completely open - you can walk straight into Russia (and lost mushroomers often do so by accident) because there isn't even a chainlink fence or a cleared sand strip marking the border.

Contrast that with the European countries that actually fear an invasion: they are preparing bridges for demolition, scouting suitable areas for minefields, digging anti-tank ditches, installing reinforced pillboxes and bunkers. Last week, Latvian media reported that the government is even considering tearing up railways near the Russian border to slow the invading force.

The scenarios the Russians are preparing for include, for example, mass unrest in Belarus that would lead to Russia invading the country to keep its dictator in place, like they did in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956. In 2020, this almost happened in Belarus over fraudulent elections and mass protests that were ultimately suppressed without requiring a "brotherly military intervention" by Russia.

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

#897

Post by imtringued »

seec wrote: post #308
jswelker wrote: post #102

Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…

At least the good part about the US situation is that people are still free to choose for themselves. The cost isn't redirected to the whole population at large via taxation. In the EU it's much worse, because the same reality is materialising, but it is still advertised as "free". Of course, this is the path to a form of soft communism and all systems are becoming dysfunctional and unable to create real value at the…

If you've ever attended a German public university you would realize that they strongly operate on Darwinist principles with every incentive to kick students out with hard exams because the students aren't a direct source of funding.

During my bachelor degree the average exam had a 30% failure rate and the first semester exams almost 55%. If you fail an exam three times in a row, you're not even allowed to shop around universities, because you're banned from studying that degree for life. Instead, you're forced to find a similar degree that doesn't have course overlap on the exams you failed, which means you can only transfer some of your credits to the new degree. It's do or die.

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

#898

Post by Ray20 »

jacquesm wrote: post #871
Ray20 wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on. Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship led by the communist Putin. As if communist dictators care. Look at North Korea, it's just the results of an unremarkable year.

Putin is a lot but he is not a communist.

He is literally a communist, and was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until the very end of that party's existence.

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

#899

Post by jacquesm »

Ray20 wrote: post #898
jacquesm wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putin is a lot but he is not a communist.

He is literally a communist, and was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until the very end of that party's existence.

I have a bridge to sell...

Putin is a kleptocrat and a murderer.

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

#900

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sokoloff wrote: post #885
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, I still think 22 year old me might still flub even a simple on the fly question (granting that I do my first internship with IBM writing lots of code when I was 20).

If they flub half of the time and go on seven such interviews, they have over a 99% chance to pass at least one of them. And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?

Interviews are learning experiences, you get better at it the more often you do them. My first comment in this thread was that this guy was just a learning experience for these students. Summing integers is easy, understanding someone’s rushed description of what they want done along with rushing to code or write a solution on a whiteboard is the hard part.
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