Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?
For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.
And Americans leave because employers will just replace them with offshoring and h1bs to save money. It's a self perpetuating cycle. Loyalty goes both ways. Employees finally realized that they should be treating employers like employers have always treated employees. That's capitalism.
Trump could cancel H1B but most likely he won't. If for no other reason than as a favour to his billionaire friends. They are more important than the popular idea of America first, American jobs etc. here Trump literally says we need H1B because we need talent, and USA doesn't have the talent. Not a good look for a supposedly America first president.. https://youtu.be/U2XUNKcKtx0?si=GOFyMGxqUIbyGD6T
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
Make money not a consideration in applying for college? Not by handing out whatever the universities are asking for of course, but by giving them a fixed $X per student.
It's a prime example of the tragedy of the commons and there's honestly not much that can be done because of how competition on the supply side of the labor market works; for employers, a degree is no longer a differentiator among candidates.
The difference is that printing money creates more money, but doesn't create any more stuff. College degrees (theoretically) create more educated people. If you just "hand out" degrees, that doesn't happen, but if you actually teach people, then it does.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Yeah that's unfortunate then, America has changed so much in the past 10-15 years that advice that was worth following for the previous generation is just totally useless for the current circumstances. I don't think the parents had bad intentions though, they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
> they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.
1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight.
What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
I wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
If a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders.
what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.)
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.
Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
My kids will still go to a four-year university, but for the education and experience, not for any vocational aspirations. I have no delusions about the marketability of an undergraduate degree.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
> A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Agreed. Going to college for the social experience and for generally learning about the world is effectively a luxury good now. For people who just want a path to stable employment, the ROI on college no longer makes sense at all.
That’s kind of my point. Everyone wants to narrowly focus on what will bring them the most value as quickly as possible. Being educated in a wide array of subjects doesn’t seem useful at first, but it actually makes you a better communicator, and citizen.
Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
Those degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
That's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
The pendulum swings. College was only for the elite. Then it slowly expanded until it got to the point of, “everyone should go to college, doesn’t matter what you study.” Now it’s swinging back. Hopefully we manage to get to a reasonable place and not go all the way back to college only being for elites.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
My comment is generalizing, as is the thread subject. It has been a downwards moving trend, and for young workers I will say that a college degree is now a negative factor. But that doesn't define the candidate.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
Obviously if you want to learn, there has never been as many resources as today for free with YouTube and other stuff. College remains only relevant for the piece of paper and networking and the four-year party experience.
Doesn’t help when leaders are trashing it and classifying things as not “professional” to further put up more barriers to entry. Along with the constant attacks about them being indoctrination centers, pulling funding for being too liberal, or not pro-Israel enough, or whatever else this administration has officially been able to strongarm many institutions about.
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
Many (most?) people go to college primarily for the piece of paper, not for the educational and social experience.
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost
This isn’t socially useful.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
Europe has a much lower expenditure per student compared to the US.
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?
That's what taxes are for. Subsidizing public good.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
Was it much more subsidized in the US when it was much cheaper, though?
I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
> don't see the fundamental difference
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
Employers just hire experienced h1bs instead, they won’t leave after being trained, no reason to hire an American
There are ~700k h1bs out of ~157 million American jobs. So about 99.6% of jobs in America are held by Americans and 0.4% by h1bs.
Now do the tech industry (high paying American jobs)
> Now do the tech industry
Do you have numbers? If you don’t, the appropriate baseline is population.
Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.
And Americans leave because employers will just replace them with offshoring and h1bs to save money. It's a self perpetuating cycle. Loyalty goes both ways. Employees finally realized that they should be treating employers like employers have always treated employees. That's capitalism.
The h1b program can essentially be eliminated tomorrow. Trump could theoretically make h1b visas non-transferable, charge a high annual renewal, etc.
Trump could cancel H1B but most likely he won't. If for no other reason than as a favour to his billionaire friends. They are more important than the popular idea of America first, American jobs etc. here Trump literally says we need H1B because we need talent, and USA doesn't have the talent. Not a good look for a supposedly America first president.. https://youtu.be/U2XUNKcKtx0?si=GOFyMGxqUIbyGD6T
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
Consider the contraposition.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
Make money not a consideration in applying for college? Not by handing out whatever the universities are asking for of course, but by giving them a fixed $X per student.
That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.
It's a prime example of the tragedy of the commons and there's honestly not much that can be done because of how competition on the supply side of the labor market works; for employers, a degree is no longer a differentiator among candidates.
I like to call this degree inflation.
The difference is that printing money creates more money, but doesn't create any more stuff. College degrees (theoretically) create more educated people. If you just "hand out" degrees, that doesn't happen, but if you actually teach people, then it does.
I agree with you.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Told by who?
Well for starters, perhaps the older homeowners who live in safe neighborhoods and provide for [young Americans] without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Their parents.
Yeah that's unfortunate then, America has changed so much in the past 10-15 years that advice that was worth following for the previous generation is just totally useless for the current circumstances. I don't think the parents had bad intentions though, they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
> they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.
All this states is expensive degrees aren't worth it, not paid for education.
1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The more important question is do they learn to solve it, fail out, or just get pushed through?
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
At my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight.
If standards aren't lowered and they're just failed out, that's fine eventually, but I would prefer it to be fine from day 1.
What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
I wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
If a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders.
Is it a failure of the process? The selection process is to pick people who willing to pay, not who can solve equations.
It's a failure for higher education, yes.
If the college would accept someone like that, they probably don't aim to take their students to a very high level.
This is incorrect. It's 1 in ~50. Still bad!
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
Shouldn't that be 8.5% x 75% since you want the percent who could not answer it?
Sorry, typo. I meant 25% couldn't answer it.
My roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns....
Why the Downvote? It is true.
It may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair.
Well, if someone feels extremely inferior, true.
Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation.
I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
My father taught me simple algebra when I was around 8 using puzzles.
It's due to your username; they think you're a troll.
Well. I love Beijing. But I am not Chinese, nor do I currently live in China. Unfortunately.
what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.)
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
The quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture).
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
The top end may not be limited by money, but the bottom of education is, especially when it comes to public k-12 schools.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
The school system is downstream broader social issues here. It can be shockingly expensive to deal with the various behavioral problems that disproportionately impact students from lower income communities. Students from stable homes with available and invested parents practically teach themselves.
All those downstream effects from a functional social security service.
Do you not know that the US is a Federal system and there are (at minimum) 50 different ways that schools are funded?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
1 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/
Equity remains a valid criticism of LCFF in California specifically.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED670929.pdf
Most are overpaying in taxes for what they are getting.
Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.
Fear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
San Francisco USD’s lottery system has entered the chat
I guess so mostly foreign students and the wealthier folks can get them? Doesn’t seem like a win, but with AI taking jobs, who knows
I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
My kids will still go to a four-year university, but for the education and experience, not for any vocational aspirations. I have no delusions about the marketability of an undergraduate degree.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
> A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
>> but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
Agreed. Going to college for the social experience and for generally learning about the world is effectively a luxury good now. For people who just want a path to stable employment, the ROI on college no longer makes sense at all.
I think our society’s obsession with thinking of everything in terms of ROI is destructive.
That’s kind of my point. Everyone wants to narrowly focus on what will bring them the most value as quickly as possible. Being educated in a wide array of subjects doesn’t seem useful at first, but it actually makes you a better communicator, and citizen.
Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
Those degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
That's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
Someone should turn that comment into a Twilight Zone episode...
We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed.
No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein...
So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
What's the point? You're either going to be replaced by AI or a robot (or both) anyway.
The pendulum swings. College was only for the elite. Then it slowly expanded until it got to the point of, “everyone should go to college, doesn’t matter what you study.” Now it’s swinging back. Hopefully we manage to get to a reasonable place and not go all the way back to college only being for elites.
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College degrees now have negative value for hiring. A company wanting to hire a reliable and competent worker will avoid college graduates.
Seems like you’re hurting some feelings.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
My comment is generalizing, as is the thread subject. It has been a downwards moving trend, and for young workers I will say that a college degree is now a negative factor. But that doesn't define the candidate.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
Obviously if you want to learn, there has never been as many resources as today for free with YouTube and other stuff. College remains only relevant for the piece of paper and networking and the four-year party experience.
Doesn’t help when leaders are trashing it and classifying things as not “professional” to further put up more barriers to entry. Along with the constant attacks about them being indoctrination centers, pulling funding for being too liberal, or not pro-Israel enough, or whatever else this administration has officially been able to strongarm many institutions about.