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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

#941

Post by michaelscott »

serverholic wrote: post #640
hardtke wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40…

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

Not in direct answer to the question, but as an interesting aside, the conditions of space didn't allow for normal memory implementations in the Apollo missions back in the 60s. An alternative form, called core rope memory [1], used the placement of copper wire along a rope to encode ROM-style instructions into blocks of memory. This memory was literally woven by a team of older ladies for the purposes of use in the guidance systems. Great anecdote from the annals of comp sci history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

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

#943

Post by wil421 »

upbeat_general wrote: post #889
wil421 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Georgia’s hope scholarship did in the 2000s. Now Hope doesn’t cover everything but there’s something called the Zell Miller grant that you can get in conjunction with Hope that pretty much pays most of tuition like the old program. Hope is funded by the lottery.

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

#944

Post by moonchrome »

diob wrote: post #903
elihu wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Skilled trades pay better than most bachelor's degree track jobs. The impression I get from hanging out a bit in the welding subreddit is that a lot of people get into welding thinking it'll be a lucrative profession (because that's what people on the internet say about plumbers and welders and electricians and so forth), and what they eventually discover is that while it's possible to make a lot of money as a weld…

Exactly on the dot. In the trades you _have_ to move up to management / or above in short order due to the toll it takes on your body. But not everyone can be a manager, I think we need better protections for the doers (unions, etc.). A lot of naive kids go into trades and trash their body only to end up with nothing or a life addicted to painkillers.

Just because you own a business doesn't mean you're a manager, I know plenty of people who work independently and work alone or have one or two guys working with them.

It's surprisingly similar to software development in that regard, once you get skilled enough you can get better money contracting than being employed and right now there's so much work that the "safety net" doesn't concern you.

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

#945

Post by majani »

ozzythecat wrote: post #347
paulpauper wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes. Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ignoring that college grads tend to have much higher wages and lower unemployment compared to high school grads. If you look at FIRE subs for example, almost everyone who attains ear…

You’re implying causation - that a college degree is the cause of these outcomes. I’m not convinced that’s true, and in my mind, it might be one of the most damaging beliefs. It could be that people who are driven or passionate, on average, want to pursue higher education, or that they take on risks, exercise their brains in learning endeavors, and it’s their effort and drive that leads to success. It’s entirely poss…

Yup, it's certain traits that lead people to go for certain degrees and we use the degree as a quick and fair signal for those traits. If you have a problem with that signal, try develop another one which is at least as quick and fair of a representation of those traits as a degree is.

Also if companies gain a substantial advantage using other signals outside of degrees, you can be guaranteed that their competitors in their industry will follow. In media and marketing, degrees have long been abandoned for other signals such as portfolios and social media engagement

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

#946

Post by cascom »

elihu wrote: post #715
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. The impression I get from hanging out a bit in the welding subreddit is that a lot of people get into welding thinking it'll be a lucrative profession (because that's what people on the internet say about plumbers and welders and electricians and so forth), and what they eventually discover is that while it's possible to make a lot of money as a weld…

You don’t need to be an owner management in welding (though that is definitely the better path), but you have to be great welder and you have to be willing to work long and hard (most people I know wouldn’t make it through a shift working on a refinery turnaround in PPE on the gulf coast in September).

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

#947

Post by kerneloftruth »

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. University isn't for everyone, and thankfully many instead pursue skilled trades (which benefits society as well as the tradesman).

If the mantra is that everyone should go to university, then it becomes an extension of high school, and the credentials less valuable... and mostly the student loan industry thrives.

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

#948

Post by dna_polymerase »

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…

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

That's a claim none of you sources can or even could support. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

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

#949

Post by mellavora »

pb7 wrote: post #652
devwastaken wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Trades are overwhelmingly what people do when they don't go for a BA, and often have houses and children far before college graduates. Many more mechanics, plumber, hvac, electrical, welders, pipfitters, etc than we give credit for. 3. Scholarships are not based on intelligence. They are based on access to resources. Many good scholarships require references, achievements, good writing, and lower income. Hard to d…

>Trades are overwhelmingly what people do when they don't go for a BA, and often have houses and children far before college graduates. Having a house and children as soon as possible isn't a win. It's what happens when you lack imagination. There's so much more to life than pumping out kids at 21 in your 3/2 in fly over country.

>Having a house and children as soon as possible isn't a win. It's what happens when you lack imagination. There's so much more to life than pumping out kids at 21 in your 3/2 in fly over country.

Really??

Just as a counter-example, if you have your kids in your young 20s, then they are out of your house when you hit your mid 40s.

In your mid-40s, you tend to have much more money and a much better sense of what you want out of life.

So assuming you have children at some point, when is the best time to be child-free, in your 20s or in your 40s?

And what about the joy of grandchildren?

When society tells you to wait until you are 35 to have kids, how is having kids at 21 "lacking imagination"? Going against the crowd requires imagination.

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

#950

Post by randomdata »

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…

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

And yet incomes have held stagnant through the entire rise of college attainment. That contradicts the notion that there is more money to be made.

Within a given population, those who are born more capable will earn more than those who are less capable. Those who are born more capable are able to go further in school and be more productive in the workplace for the same reasons. Someone born with a crippling disability that forced them to drop out of high school also struggles to find gainful employment for the same reasons.

However, over time, those in similar standing seem to end up making the same amount of money no matter what. If the existence of college and everything associated with it were to magically vanish, those born more capable would still earn more money over their lifetime than those born less capable.

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