I’m confused why this isn’t talked about more often.
As a parent, most of my time that I spend thinking about money is thinking about how to pay for college. It is the second largest purchase im going to make next to my house, and it is the financial decision that sucks up the most thought.
If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it, then that impacts how I think about whether to orient the next 20 years of savings around saving for my kids college.
If that person interacting with my kids is their boss, or person tasked with hiring them, then this _greatly_ impacts my decision to pay my kids’ college.
Note: I don’t mean to imply “I’m deciding between whether my kids have a dedicated time period where they live on their own and just study”. I’m specifically talking about paying for an education experience that will result in a credential (a degree).
Maybe I’m greatly impacted by Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education” but some part of me believes the main value of a college education is that other people think a college education is valuable.
This seems to be getting less important in my lifetime. It’s hard to tell where the general sentiment is gonna be 20 years from now.
College should be for becoming educated. Not for getting a job.
If paying huge amounts of money isn’t worth it to you to be educated, fine. But that doesn’t mean the education is bad, just that it’s not worth it from a financial perspective.
I studied philosophy and art, even though I could have studied something more “practical” (a dubious distinction that I think is less and less accurate in the dynamic modern economy, but that’s a separate discussion.) I don’t regret it for a second, and if my future kids want to study art and philosophy I’ll encourage them to and pay for it the best I can by then.
I'm in Europe so maybe my view is different, though there's a lot of that thinking over here too: the only possible value of higher education is the advantage it gives me in relation to others (competitiveness, perception...).
But there are other more important (imho) values.
First, it is an excellent opportunity for personal worth. Socially: change of social group, freedom to explore, independence without much responsibility. Intellectually: mastering an advanced topic, in a program less directed than previous education, geared toward people with some demonstrated skill/affinity, meaning more depth. Also, no teacher or parent asking for grades, meaning more responsibility over own learning and organization.
It's a time for exploration. As it's said in classical AI, too much exploitation and not enough exploration means suboptimal solutions.
But also, higher education provides a resource for society. People with niche knowledge, expertise in a variety of topics, means a society is more resilient to disruption, and also more likely to innovate.
University is also a place for intellectuality and individuality, values very important to sustain a democracy, since democracy's main enemy is the inside enemy, in the form of ignorance and gullibilty.
Of course, to me all this means higher education is mostly a public service and therefore should be mostly taxpayer funded, but again, I'm from Europe :)
Very well said. I think there is a feeling that higher education standardizes thought, but in my experience it has only broadened it. Education institutions are perfectly situated to bring together a diverse set of perspectives and deep expertise in order to enable us to approach the world with informed and thoughtful perspectives. AI is a perfect stand in for the moment because of it's nuance; higher education has a responsibility to serve the public by enabling society to better understand it's impact from humanities to hard science.
As a Dane, I have also heard these fluffy benefits described but they lack evidence. Everyone gets a basic education in school and I agree that's valuable. When it comes to studying esoteric subjects with zero scientific and economic and social benefit? I just disagree. I don't think tertiary education is intrinsically valuable. One can be well socialised and master subjects and skills without university.
> Socially: change of social group, freedom to explore, independence without much responsibility. In
Quite opposite, "exploring" is a good way to get reported and punished, for harmless consensual activity. All universities are now basically corporations with strict rules, code of conduct and HR department. You should be professional and treat your "coworkers" correctly, or else you get reported!
> If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it,
Many people believe college is not worth it for everyone, but believe a college degree is important for the job they’re hiring for.
This statistic also includes people who think college is too expensive for what it delivers, but that the value of a college degree is still nonzero.
There is yet another level of people who are frustrated with how academically weak and unchallenging common colleges have become, or how many students are going to 4-year degree programs to study topics with no job applicability. The answers would change completely if you asked people if a history degree from a $60K per year private college was worth it, compared to a Computer Science degree from Stanford. The question “is college worth it” is too generic to mean anything now that it could mean anything from a $200K piece of paper without real job skills, or a golden ticket into the recruiting funnel at FAANG.
This creates the discrepancy between polls like this and actual revealed hiring preferences. Many will tell you they don’t think college is worth it but will prefer applicants will college degrees.
I think what we're seeing with most people complaining about college value is a red herring. IMO, the crux of the issue is that higher education hasn't expanded availability with population growth (made even worse by expanding foreign student enrolment) combined with a general push from everybody to get more and more people into college.
There's also the fact that if everybody has a degree, it ceases to be a differentiator. Over the years, the best and worst colleagues I've ever had have had degrees (or more) from very prestigious schools even. Some of them just couldn't move on from academic thinking, because that's what they pushed themselves for their whole lives.
> IMO, the crux of the issue is that higher education hasn't expanded availability with population growth
I don’t know where you're getting this. The complaint is that too many people are going into higher education where they shouldn’t be, getting expensive educations for careers that don’t need it.
> higher education hasn't expanded availability with population growth
What are you basing this on? Has the ratio of available college intake to size of the potential student population (say ages 18-26) that has declined year over year?
Top private (and public) universities added relatively few undergraduate seats since 1980, while applications multiplied, helped by the Common App and students applying to many more schools. Admission rates at the most selective schools dropped from roughly 15–30% in 1980 to 3–6% today. Flagship public universities grew somewhat more but have also become far more selective (especially in California).
There has been a decline in total student population since ~2010 when the echo-boom millennials mostly finished school, but that has been impacting the "lower quality" or smaller schools more.
When discussing falling admission rates you also need to consider the rising application rates. In the 1980s it was rare to apply a top university and students applied to relatively few universities at all.
For today’s students the strategy is to spray applications across a large number of schools and choose later. Even when I was in high school we were advised to apply to several reach schools (where our applications were probably not enough but it was worth trying) and a number of backup schools (where everyone was accepted) in addition to a selection of colleges in our range. That’s one reason why rejection rates are rising.
> Admission rates at the most selective schools dropped from roughly 15–30% in 1980 to 3–6% today
They wouldn't be the most selective schools if they expanded access to everyone. They are performing their function and I would think the drop in admission rates would be due to the increase in number of applicants unless those numbers are already adjusted for that.
> If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it, then that impacts how I think about whether to orient the next 20 years of savings around saving for my kids college.
It doesn't matter what people think, the question is whether the jobs your kids want to do require a degree or no. Let say they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, then college education is needed. Even programming which is a field with a lot of self-taught people and hobbyists, professionals without a college degree are the exception.
Did your parents pay for your education? Do you wish they did if they didn't? You cannot simply calculate hard ROI on a life experience. College is a place for a kid to not only learn how to be a part of the bureaucratic machine, but a human. There might be other cheaper ways to do this.
No, holding down a job is part of being an adult. I'm 38, I paid my way through college working full time. I graduated in 3.5 years with credits from HS and winter+summer classes. What made me stand out from other applicants when applying for new jobs in 2009, was that I had experience working and they had no 'real world' experience.
> You cannot simply calculate hard ROI on a life experience.
College is still and always an option for people. Stony Brook University is an excellent choice, runs around $10k a year which is easily afforded making $20+ an hour for entry level work on Long Island. Yes, you live at home with your parents, and I'm assuming your relationship is strong enough to let you be independent otherwise they wouldn't pay for your college anyway, while commuting to college because college isn't expensive, housing is.
But if you don't go to college then you get a life experience that those who did go to college didn't get. No one is missing out on a 'life experience', you are choosing to have a different one. Or maybe it's better said that you don't get to have all of the possible life experiences, and being in a dorm on a college isn't inherently superior to others.
Important consideration. This is purely anecdata, but my parents didn't pay for my education, but I have a lot of friends whose parents did. Those of us grinding to pay for and get through school really took it a lot more seriously and valued it a lot higher. I saw a lot of peers treating it as a party opportunity and just striving to pass their classes rather than actually learning and deeply understanding the material. It could certainly be correlation without causation, but it left an impression on me. For this reason I'm intentionally not paying for my kids college (though I am offering free room and board, and even a car, in my house should they choose to live at home).
The question conflates education as a social good - unarguable, unless you're an authoritarian and/or a cultist - with the value of college education as a consumer product.
The case for a college education as a product has become less and less convincing as the job market value of credentials has dropped and costs have risen.
I would not assume college in its current form is going to be a thing 20 years from now, except - possibly - as a legacy finishing school for the extremely rich.
Everyone else is going to be scrabbling for income in an economy where a lot of what used to be white collar work is done by AI, and a lot of what used to be blue collar work is done by robots.
The critical skills will be creative independence, improvisation, and systems thinking - the ability to hack the social and financial economy to invent paid work instead of applying for it.
>The question conflates education as a social good - unarguable, unless you're an authoritarian and/or a cultist - with the value of college education as a consumer product.
At least he's just haplessly conflating them in a question rather than engaging in the (too common around here) behavior of maliciously conflating them in a dishonest attempt to rebuff someone who's criticizing the value/utility of college for the latter
I have always said that if someone is considering college for the credentials then they're not in the right mindset to get the most out of it. The perspective that a parent should save up to "get their kid into" a school always felt infantilizing to me as well. College should be the time that students step up and take a role in determining their own preferences, their own finances, their own direction.
Your parents' earnings directly impact how much college costs for you. And costs across the board have ballooned out of control for decades. To me, what you describe is a romantic ideal that's impractical and outdated, at least in the US.
I'm well aware of the current situation. Costs are ballooning out of control -- not because affordable options don't exist -- but primarily because children are being told to go to college, and given blank checks in the form of loans, but are not being prepared to plan their own financial future. College should not be treated as high school 2.0 with a blank check.
The average price of attendance is being inflated because the average student is picking a school first and then burdening themselves and their parents with whatever gigantic loans it takes. Kids are picking a school based on campus tours or social pressures, but on the first day of class they still couldn't tell you how much it's costing them to go there. They are underprepared to begin with.
There are affordable 4-year schools if you are prepared and shop around. The US has more scholarship opportunities than anywhere else in the world if you are prepared in advance to get them. There are expensive programs that are worth financing. And there are dirt cheap 2 year options that are still affordable today, on an hourly wage income.
But there are also plenty of stupid decisions that are possible to make when buying a higher education, and the system is not set up to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
If a student can't say what they want to study, why they want to study it, and how they're going to pay for it -- they probably aren't prepared to be making the decision to attend. Unfortunately, too many parents are uncomfortable accepting this transition of responsibility in life and pressure them to "just try it". Signing the loan docs are easy enough, and that's the recipe for disaster.
The biggest purchase for my kids is health insurance, and healthcare overall.
State taxpayer funded universities are not that expensive. I figure if my kid is worthy and lucky enough, they will get a scholarship to the elite universities, or they can go to the state taxpayer funded ones for less.
If the state ones get too expensive, there is community college and or just starting an apprentice trade job.
It's access to the upper crust of society that you're paying for, not an education. Just pursue scholarships and state schools (which all provide globally competitive programs) and the chances this is the second-highest purchase you'll ever make will be extremely low.
If that kind of access is what you’re looking for, you really need to be focusing on a smaller slice of schools. If you just want access to job networks for PMC-type[0] jobs, state schools are fine. PMC-type jobs are reasonably profitable (for now) but they are by no means for the “upper crust” (I usually interpret this to mean 0.1% or similar).
OK yes, you can get 10% access at state schools, absolutely. Most of these have PMC feeder programs that give you a direct path to this kind of career. Just have to pick the right degree/program (not hard to do, they often advertise it heavily and have visible corporate partners).
Depends on what "upper crust" means to you. Political class? Perhaps not. But it still offers some peer selection that's important for life outcomes for most people (e.g. lower chance of divorce).
How many colleges provide access to the upper crust of society? 10? 20? The vast majority of kids aren’t getting into them anyway, so it’s a moot point for them.
> It's access to the upper crust of society that you're paying for, not an education.
Generic college degree does not get into the upper crust. It’s a basic signal that someone is able to follow a program, stick with something for a few years, and complete some work. Sounds basic but when you’re hiring people it’s a valuable signal.
For most people trying to send that signal, getting scholarships plus in-state tuition is the right answer. A good enough college education doesn’t have to be expensive.
To get into “upper crust of society” range you can’t treat college like a checkbox where any college will do. The education does actually matter. The cynical hot takes about college being only about networking and a piece of paper are wrong at the upper end. The educational programs at the upper end are hard. They’re demanding. You’re going to have to learn something to graduate. People do actually fail out or give up, which is rare at the generic programs.
Even if you don’t use much of the education of one of those top programs (like if you study computer science and then take a finance job) you’ve learned how to learn, how to get hard things done, how to manage yourself and your time, and how to follow through on something hard that most people cannot do. That is the real signal of a top education program if you’re going to discount the education part.
There’s always sneering about how someone knew an Ivy League grad who was actually the dumbest person they know, or anecdotes about how the smartest programmer I ever met had no college degree, or other anecdotes they try to disprove this. They’re missing the point that it’s not a 100% perfect signal nor the only way to be good at something, but it is a strong heuristic that someone is at least equipped to set goals and accomplish hard things.
Higher Ed (and Ed) has declined once again as well. There are many majors that are, to be completely honest, jokes and shouldn't even exist. I personally had plenty of classes that I wrote an essay and knew I would get an A as long as I agree with the professor's/teacher's pet political views, or the same paper would mysteriously be docked a few points. High Schools teach less Shakespeare, and more random children's books that aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Liberal Arts and Humanities spend too much time on pet modern social justice causes, and not enough time on Cicero, Aristotle, etc. If we go back to a solid foundation of a classical education, actually reading the great works in school, leaning into critical thinking, and adding rigor, then higher education will actually be worth it. Math and Science I believe is still pretty solid and rigorous in higher ed but k-12 needs to be totally revamped.
I think quite a bit of this phenomenon should be attributed to how young adults choose their education/career path. We're still in the "you can be whatever you want" and "if you make your passion into your work, you won't work a single day in your life" phase of the civilizational boom/bust cycle. Do high schoolers familiarize themselves with the supply and demand per field or do they wing that part/ignore it? For the fields that they feel pulled to, do they consider which people become financially well off after graduating in it? E.g. is it mainly authors, public speakers and professors, all basically in educational roles, making the field a government subsidized ponzi scheme? And do they on an ethical level consider which layer of society's hierarchy of needs their future expertise will feed into? As in, does the subject revolve around pleasure maxing in the upper echelons, or will it be useful for infrastructure, supply chains, defense, health,...
It seems that most people wing most of those points in a pursuit for what they think their life's passion to be at 18 years old. And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices, at least afaik, instead relying on the import of immigrant experts while at the same time experiencing massive brain drain to better off countries, e.g Germans moving to Switzerland en masse.
> And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices
NYS, as much as I complain about the state government, does actually do this a bit. One is the BOCES program which is an adult education system that teach trades, and highschoolers can go to for free (Think diesel mechanics, carpentry, and also things like computer repair or networking). The other is that there is a system for free associate degrees for adults 25+ (recently the requirement for them to not have a college degree was removed so that there can be reskilling), but the limitation is career focused jobs. So you can get a free associates degree in nursing, health sciences, engineering technology, metal fabrication, etc. but not in say literature.
These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States. College may indeed be getting less “worth it” in pure financial terms, but it’s certainly ironic that many people only had a high view of them in the first place because of the supposed financial benefits. Now that those financial benefits are less certain, out comes the anti-intellectualism again.
A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.
Okay so isn’t the solution then to increase standards, not to undermine the concept of college?
I really don’t get what articles like this one are proposing. Instead of having an institution like Berkeley, we ought to just give students some YouTube videos?
Like I said, it’s very often just anti-intellectualism and culture war nonsense.
There was nothing you couldn't have already learned from a book. Many professors were never even great at teaching and are employed for research.
Attending college as a student was always partly about status and once the standards of an institution drops so does the signal that comes from holding a degree. It is only natural that people will see college as less worthy of an investment.
Counterpoint to your blanket statement: You do get some life experience, but for me, having a job gave me more experience than doing group projects. And as far as learning things, I often feel that I would have learned more by just goofing around on the computer on my own. In fact, I did.
To be fair, I commuted for two years and didn’t really have the full social experience. But does higher education actually deserve any credit for that aspect, or would it happen naturally with any group of young people?
I don’t think it’s merely being around other young people. There are classes on topics that you will never ever come across in a job context, yet will have a major impact on your personality, mind, etc.
Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t get too much of that in my degree because for me, college was primarily a financial thing. If I was just pursuing the love of knowledge, I would have loved to take philosophy, but it didn’t count toward my electives.
I definitely would have felt differently about college if money was not a concern. I got accepted to CMU but didn’t go because I didn’t want the debt, and at the state college I attended, I didn’t major in what I wanted to do. Looking back, I do feel some regret, but also, if I had chosen differently, I would still be paying for it today. Even if you’re looking for an amazing learning experience, the unbelievable cost forces it to be a primarily financial endeavor, at which point it makes more sense to forgo niceties like philosophy and study it on your own time, or audit classes or something.
For sure, I don’t think less of people that decide it’s not financially worth it. In many cases it’s not.
But I don’t like it when people then rationalize that decision into “it actually sucks anyway,” because IME that’s not true.
In my personal experience, I studied philosophy in college, and have continued reading books off-and-on since.
There really is no book replacement for being in a class of 5-10 philosophy students, arguing about Kant or metaphysics for 3 hours, or in having a professor rip your paper apart and highlight every flaw in an argument. It just won’t happen if you’re self-studying.
Life experience? You people are retarded. There was a whole Ask HN thread the other week on how to obtain access
Do you expect AI or a book to synthesize biological lab equipment for you? Do you think that the average person has the funds to build out an RF test lab? Or do you think everything is computer science where you coild in the past get hired because the hardware required to gain anything close to hands on experience is a commodity?
Yes, being surrounded by smart and motivated people is a huge bonus. But if your classmate doesn't even know fractions, it looks like you won't be getting that either.
Forget financial benefits: There's just a high risk of ending up in a crippling financial hole. Many schools have tuitions over 60k/yr. Add mandatory campus living costing 20-30k on top.
I have a child graduating high school right now. As a developer in the US, this means no child of mine is getting need based scholarships. So the question becomes whether it really makes sense to go to any of said expensive colleges vs handing the child 200k+ and going to a worse school where he gets merit scholarships worth 6 figures over the course of his stay.
When you put those kinds of prices out there, do not be surprised if people start to think it's all a ripoff.
Let’s imagine a Michelin star restaurant that has rave reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s affordable, too, which helps its popularity.
But over time, the restaurant increases its prices. The food remains exactly the same: absolutely delicious. But now the prices are 10x what they were before. And so naturally the discussion becomes: “I’m sure it’s good, but is it worth the cost?”
A rational response to higher education would be similar. Except that’s not how most people, or at least media articles, frame it. Instead of saying “the food is good but it’s not worth the cost,” they just deny that it is delicious in the first place. It’s a very particular kind of short-sightedness that has its roots in the anti-intellectual cultural history of America.
To use your metaphor, I think the more accurate description is that the food has decreased in quality and they increased the cost. The chef is resting on their laurels, maybe focused on other things. Maybe they spent a lot of money on a fancy renovation (dorms and gyms) with no impact to the actual food (education). Maybe they no longer shell out for the best staff and increasingly use lower priced employees (adjunct professors).
This actually happens all the time. It's hard to stay at the top and many Michelin star restaurants still close and go out of business.
I think that’s a small part of it, but it’s not how the critics usually frame it.
It’s almost always criticized because it costs more, doesn’t guarantee a good job, etc. and not because supposed educational standards have fallen. As if the people reading the NYPost were so invested in the quality of education at Berkeley…
I’d even bet that educational standards could be near zero, but as long as the degree guaranteed a high-paying job, those same people wouldn’t care at all about the education.
>These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
Pick any nation and it's the same. Intellectuals as a class catch a bad rap because of how many of them are useful idiots for whatever the oppressive and/or extractive systems in a society are at any one time.
Like crack open any page of the history book. Whether you're reading 1970s exclusionary zoning 1930s eugenics or 1850s "inferior negro" type crap you're reading about something that a large enough to be a problem fraction of educated white collar people saw fit to peddle at everyone else.
It's perfectly understandable that a decent enough to be noticeable subset of everyone else sees this questionable track record and writes off the whole lot.
>A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.
This assumes you believe that graduates are indeed gaining skills or beliefs that contribute to the betterment of society. Part of the reaction is a backlash to DEI/Woke and its a true statement that many recent graduates are not in fact contributing to but actively wishing for or working towards the downfall of US Society.
I think that influence is a handful of classes at best. Unless you’re suggesting that every university in the United States has no educational value anymore, and has been replaced with a Fox News caricature?
Not going to college was probably one of the better decisions I made. I chose to join the US Navy instead as a submariner (nuclear). Rather than signing up for 100k student debt, I was signing a 100k enlistment bonus. I was able to purchase my first house at 22. I was then immediately picked up by Google once my enlistment expired.
Obviously everyone's situation will be different. But now having been in the software engineering realm for many years, the level of maturity and execution I see in college graduates is deeply concerning. I generally outperform not necessarily because I'm smarter, but mostly because I just have strong discipline, communication, and conflict resolution skills gained from years in the military.
Information is practically free now. And many people that are fresh out of college are still not ready for the careers their degrees supposedly prepared them for. I expect either for colleges to adapt to provide more real-world knowledge or for companies to care less about whether someone has a degree and more about their work history and personal projects. For me, 4 years of work in the field (commercial construction and service calls) was a much better decision than 4 years of college would have been. My current company hired me for my experience in the field.
I strongly agree. Not only is information free, but application of that knowledge is also either free or incredibly cheap. The case for university is very poor now, and looking ahead even two years, I question its existence. Even before AI, it had basically become a signalling mechanism: "I have the right contacts, socio-economic status, grades, and foresight to get into this specific university and study this specific course. I have no idea how to apply it in the real world." There is some value in that signalling mechanism, but it appears most of the value derived was not even the degree itself. Let's cut out the middleman and on our CVs just put our parents' income, our zip code, our IQ, grades, and connections. I know that's crass and for the record I'm not advocating for this. I'm just deconstructing a sick industry which desperately needs upending.
Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. People may still accept that they need a college degree to get their desired job, but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it.
Prices are up substantially. Grade inflation is out of control, demonstrating that people are paying for the credential more than the education. Masters degrees have become a way for international students to purchase a visa. No one is learning anything.
> but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it.
I don't understand how we can have this conversation when the cost and quality of the product is so, so incredibly varied.
Some people loop in room and board with college costs, but you need to live somewhere even if you aren't in college. The two decisions aren't intrinsically intertwined. Being enrolled in a college might give you some options you wouldn't have otherwise, but if it's not a superior option to what you already have then you shouldn't take it. In other words college 'room and board' cost should either be ignored because it's the same price you'd pay elsewhere or it should be a net benefit if it's a subsidized, multi-tenant solution.
Meanwhile other's go to colleges that cost $10k a year for tuition and fee's, other's go to ones that run $40k+ per year. One college might focus on education and career prep/placement, another highlights their athletic teams and greek life parties.
With anything that requires patience, you have a problem competing with immediate rewards.
Why should I learn Stoke's Theorem? Why should I learn Nietzsche? Questions you can't answer until you learn them, and questions that compete with "how will I find a job" and "how will I find a girlfriend".
The problem is, if you don't learn how to answer such questions, you will not know that such questions exist. You will find a job and a partner, and think you never needed to contemplate any of the things you didn't think about.
I think there are several interrelated factors at play here
1) is the dilution of the “college” degree in terms of quality - an online degree does not generate the same outcomes as from a highly selective institution.
2) value for money for a college degree keeps declining (unless you get it for free) - tuitions have gone up astronomically and colleges have spent lavishly on administrators, student housing and sports complexes, all without improving or changing the core product for which they are charging (education).
3) too many / the wrong people are going to college - just look at the universities that will basically take anyone, less than a third graduate, and they borrow / are in debt at graduation, and they have starting salaries that no better than highschool grads (say USC - Aiken)
4) students pursuing expensive degrees for jobs that do not pay / low ROI (we need techers and social workers but spending $200k-$400k to become a social worker that pays $45k/yr doesn’t seem to be the winning proposition).
5) if you’re somewhat mechanically minded, are willing to travel and work outside, and can pass a background check / drug screen you can earn $75k/yr inside of two years working a blue collar job.
Given these elements - it seems unsurprising that more and more people don’t see college as the answer.
Doesn't the graph make this easy to interpret? College used to not be seen as necessary by the majority of people and so only those with a strong aptitude or desire to pursue higher education did so. It became a metric to use during hiring because a degree accurately indicated that the person holding it had high aptitude or a strong interest in the field and the competency to obtain a degree. People observed this and tried to game the system by acquiring any degree to pad their resume (the motivation changed from real aptitude and interest to simply getting a higher paying job). This worked for a time while there was still an overhang in the perception of a degree but eventually the sheer volume of people with degrees made it evident that it was no longer an accurate measure. The value of a bachelor's degree in any field plummeted and was replaced by other measures (a masters, multiple degrees, PhD, exclusive schools) which were also gamed by applicants. Now the jig is up and we're in a situation where the measure is whether your family has enough money and connections to get you a laundry list of qualifications or you rely on contacts or demonstrated talent to get the higher paying jobs. The widespread discounting of the importance of higher education is a good thing, it means that people are realizing that it is no longer an exploitable measure and will hopefully lead to a correction in both the number of people getting degrees and the cost of pursuing a degree. The unfortunate part is that we're in an interim period where costs are high and there are still a lot of employers that see a degree as a box that needs to be checked.
You know what surprised me about this data? They break down the % who say having a college degree is very important by different dimensions. One dimension is, people who went to college vs. not.
You would think that people who have a college degree would be much more likely to say that college is very important. But even they are pretty lukewarm: 38% of people with a college degree say that having one is very important, vs 30% of people without one. Not that big of a difference!
I think because in the last years that the American college system has been perceived as a business and for-profit system, and that buying into that system has been associated with long term debt, the economical equation is what stands in the forefront of many people's minds when they consider pursuing a college career, and it might not make sense anymore from that perspective. If you have an education system that is perceived as a purely economical option, education is not anymore perceived as a means in itself. What kind of influence this will have on the culture of learning will probably become visible in the future - and is already apparent in certain areas of life.
For-profit colleges blossomed explicitly because people were told "college = success". In the past, college was a privilege and mostly available to wealthy families or the smartest and most ambitious kids. There was probably huge selection bias in saying this cohort had successful careers. Getting more people into college was probably a net win but diploma mills really diluted the perception of college degrees.
The original point of college (modern era) was to give employers confidence that you knew the work subject and could perform proficiently.
College weeded out those who couldn't cut it.
Then we decided everyone needs to go to college, and that society would blindly place a college tuition bet on each person.
Now everyone is going to college, and with risk assessment thrown to the wind (a 17 year old), costs have exploded. Knowing that the debt is so intense, and that it is not dischargable (society hedged their blind bets here), college has kind of stopped it's weeding out and turned more into a pay-to-win enterprise. Legions of kids without the chops are just getting shuffled through to that magic degree so they can have a shot at paying off their debt, and hey, employers just want to see that degree to unlock those white collar salaries.
But what's slowly been happening is employers feeling like they are getting had, and people with degrees are coming in the door and leaving you totally bewildered how the hell they ever finished a degree. So the requirements are loosening and scrutiny to get in is tightening.
TL;DR: The degree market has been diluting itself in an attempt to alleviate the insane cost of a degree. Jobs are noticing degrees are meaning less.
I do wonder with polls like this, that include middle-of-the road options like “fairly important,” if there could also be some change in how we communicate our preferences. Maybe we’ve got a general creeping uncertainty about everything.
Another interesting point I didn't see made in TFA, is that this decline started years before AI came bursting onto the scene and has continued on the same trajectory (for those others considering the impact AI has/will had/have on the perceived value of higher-ed).
Businesses aren't hiring as many new grads, and many "thought leader" business types are actively snorting at not needing many or educated employees.
So what do we think the "American views" would do in that situation?
Notice the pattern: It begins after ~70s oil shock and coincides with the rise of neo-liberalism, upon its promise which millions were raised to believe in: "Skilled workers will always be desirable, grill yourself forever and college is the only way that you can be recognized and labeled fit as one."
But many failed to see that this premise would result in one way, which is actually what's happening right now: Growing outsourcing (especially observable in SWE due to its nature) purely driven by market competitiveness (inevitable dynamics of neo-liberalism) and hype surrounding it (leaving no room for other players in the game to choose any other way) which can no longer be sustained through traditionally accepted way of hiring new people who can master new inventions. Although, I highly doubt this is also sustainable.
Eventually, it was well expected for people to stop believing in a system which offers very little foreseeable success of accomplishment and thus, doing manual/repetitive labor is far more preferable for people.
I think there is a tendency to conflate the decline in opinions of higher education with a larger anti-science or anti-establishment view.
I don't think this is totally the case! College costs continue to grow (well exceeding already high inflation), and the most recent way I have seen the value was framing it not around academics (or even job readiness, which is still not what college is about), but "building social skills" [1]. The college referenced in the piece is 40-70k/y depending on your status; fewer and fewer young people see taking out 100k+ of debt, 4+ years to "build social skills" as a worthwhile endeavor.
Asians are notably missing from that Gallup poll, I suspect the decline will not be so severe.
All the colleges are pretty much land trusts designed to extract money from kids with loans. There is no concern for educating anyone as the teaching staff is underpaid across the board and most of the money sucked up by leadership and sports teams that do nothing for most of the athletes even let alone the students.
Silicon Valley dropouts and well connected wealthy people make college educated people look like fools. The Feds are trying to end the Dept of Education while boosting the Big Tech AI companies.
Department of Education has no control over curriculum. Its for financing student loans. Abolishing the Department of Education and various regulations they impose on schools at all levels, could actually help curb the excessive admin and leadership hiring that you complain about in the first section.
No I think it’ll just make schools more expensive and students more in debt as the banks look to charge young people with high interest rates, thus feeding the college land-trusts.
The real solution should be to make college education as free as possible instead of spending money on forever wars and $488B on DHS and the cowards who work for them.
As a parent, most of my time that I spend thinking about money is thinking about how to pay for college. It is the second largest purchase im going to make next to my house, and it is the financial decision that sucks up the most thought.
If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it, then that impacts how I think about whether to orient the next 20 years of savings around saving for my kids college.
If that person interacting with my kids is their boss, or person tasked with hiring them, then this _greatly_ impacts my decision to pay my kids’ college.
Note: I don’t mean to imply “I’m deciding between whether my kids have a dedicated time period where they live on their own and just study”. I’m specifically talking about paying for an education experience that will result in a credential (a degree).
Maybe I’m greatly impacted by Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education” but some part of me believes the main value of a college education is that other people think a college education is valuable.
This seems to be getting less important in my lifetime. It’s hard to tell where the general sentiment is gonna be 20 years from now.
:(
College should be for becoming educated. Not for getting a job.
If paying huge amounts of money isn’t worth it to you to be educated, fine. But that doesn’t mean the education is bad, just that it’s not worth it from a financial perspective.
I studied philosophy and art, even though I could have studied something more “practical” (a dubious distinction that I think is less and less accurate in the dynamic modern economy, but that’s a separate discussion.) I don’t regret it for a second, and if my future kids want to study art and philosophy I’ll encourage them to and pay for it the best I can by then.
But there are other more important (imho) values.
First, it is an excellent opportunity for personal worth. Socially: change of social group, freedom to explore, independence without much responsibility. Intellectually: mastering an advanced topic, in a program less directed than previous education, geared toward people with some demonstrated skill/affinity, meaning more depth. Also, no teacher or parent asking for grades, meaning more responsibility over own learning and organization.
It's a time for exploration. As it's said in classical AI, too much exploitation and not enough exploration means suboptimal solutions.
But also, higher education provides a resource for society. People with niche knowledge, expertise in a variety of topics, means a society is more resilient to disruption, and also more likely to innovate.
University is also a place for intellectuality and individuality, values very important to sustain a democracy, since democracy's main enemy is the inside enemy, in the form of ignorance and gullibilty.
Of course, to me all this means higher education is mostly a public service and therefore should be mostly taxpayer funded, but again, I'm from Europe :)
Quite opposite, "exploring" is a good way to get reported and punished, for harmless consensual activity. All universities are now basically corporations with strict rules, code of conduct and HR department. You should be professional and treat your "coworkers" correctly, or else you get reported!
Outside of uni, go wild! Nobody cares!
Many people believe college is not worth it for everyone, but believe a college degree is important for the job they’re hiring for.
This statistic also includes people who think college is too expensive for what it delivers, but that the value of a college degree is still nonzero.
There is yet another level of people who are frustrated with how academically weak and unchallenging common colleges have become, or how many students are going to 4-year degree programs to study topics with no job applicability. The answers would change completely if you asked people if a history degree from a $60K per year private college was worth it, compared to a Computer Science degree from Stanford. The question “is college worth it” is too generic to mean anything now that it could mean anything from a $200K piece of paper without real job skills, or a golden ticket into the recruiting funnel at FAANG.
This creates the discrepancy between polls like this and actual revealed hiring preferences. Many will tell you they don’t think college is worth it but will prefer applicants will college degrees.
There's also the fact that if everybody has a degree, it ceases to be a differentiator. Over the years, the best and worst colleagues I've ever had have had degrees (or more) from very prestigious schools even. Some of them just couldn't move on from academic thinking, because that's what they pushed themselves for their whole lives.
I don’t know where you're getting this. The complaint is that too many people are going into higher education where they shouldn’t be, getting expensive educations for careers that don’t need it.
An oversupply of education, not undersupply.
What are you basing this on? Has the ratio of available college intake to size of the potential student population (say ages 18-26) that has declined year over year?
There has been a decline in total student population since ~2010 when the echo-boom millennials mostly finished school, but that has been impacting the "lower quality" or smaller schools more.
You said “higher education” in your original comment, but it appears you really meant elite institutions?
“Higher education” doesn’t mean the best universities. It means post-secondary education, aka college. Any college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education
When discussing falling admission rates you also need to consider the rising application rates. In the 1980s it was rare to apply a top university and students applied to relatively few universities at all.
For today’s students the strategy is to spray applications across a large number of schools and choose later. Even when I was in high school we were advised to apply to several reach schools (where our applications were probably not enough but it was worth trying) and a number of backup schools (where everyone was accepted) in addition to a selection of colleges in our range. That’s one reason why rejection rates are rising.
They wouldn't be the most selective schools if they expanded access to everyone. They are performing their function and I would think the drop in admission rates would be due to the increase in number of applicants unless those numbers are already adjusted for that.
It doesn't matter what people think, the question is whether the jobs your kids want to do require a degree or no. Let say they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, then college education is needed. Even programming which is a field with a lot of self-taught people and hobbyists, professionals without a college degree are the exception.
No, my family wasn't wealthy.
> Do you wish they did if they didn't?
No, holding down a job is part of being an adult. I'm 38, I paid my way through college working full time. I graduated in 3.5 years with credits from HS and winter+summer classes. What made me stand out from other applicants when applying for new jobs in 2009, was that I had experience working and they had no 'real world' experience.
> You cannot simply calculate hard ROI on a life experience.
College is still and always an option for people. Stony Brook University is an excellent choice, runs around $10k a year which is easily afforded making $20+ an hour for entry level work on Long Island. Yes, you live at home with your parents, and I'm assuming your relationship is strong enough to let you be independent otherwise they wouldn't pay for your college anyway, while commuting to college because college isn't expensive, housing is.
But if you don't go to college then you get a life experience that those who did go to college didn't get. No one is missing out on a 'life experience', you are choosing to have a different one. Or maybe it's better said that you don't get to have all of the possible life experiences, and being in a dorm on a college isn't inherently superior to others.
The case for a college education as a product has become less and less convincing as the job market value of credentials has dropped and costs have risen.
I would not assume college in its current form is going to be a thing 20 years from now, except - possibly - as a legacy finishing school for the extremely rich.
Everyone else is going to be scrabbling for income in an economy where a lot of what used to be white collar work is done by AI, and a lot of what used to be blue collar work is done by robots.
The critical skills will be creative independence, improvisation, and systems thinking - the ability to hack the social and financial economy to invent paid work instead of applying for it.
At least he's just haplessly conflating them in a question rather than engaging in the (too common around here) behavior of maliciously conflating them in a dishonest attempt to rebuff someone who's criticizing the value/utility of college for the latter
Glass half full and all that
https://graphics.wsj.com/marketwatch/college-debt-now-and-th...
The average price of attendance is being inflated because the average student is picking a school first and then burdening themselves and their parents with whatever gigantic loans it takes. Kids are picking a school based on campus tours or social pressures, but on the first day of class they still couldn't tell you how much it's costing them to go there. They are underprepared to begin with.
There are affordable 4-year schools if you are prepared and shop around. The US has more scholarship opportunities than anywhere else in the world if you are prepared in advance to get them. There are expensive programs that are worth financing. And there are dirt cheap 2 year options that are still affordable today, on an hourly wage income.
But there are also plenty of stupid decisions that are possible to make when buying a higher education, and the system is not set up to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
If a student can't say what they want to study, why they want to study it, and how they're going to pay for it -- they probably aren't prepared to be making the decision to attend. Unfortunately, too many parents are uncomfortable accepting this transition of responsibility in life and pressure them to "just try it". Signing the loan docs are easy enough, and that's the recipe for disaster.
State taxpayer funded universities are not that expensive. I figure if my kid is worthy and lucky enough, they will get a scholarship to the elite universities, or they can go to the state taxpayer funded ones for less.
If the state ones get too expensive, there is community college and or just starting an apprentice trade job.
[0] Professional-managerial class, since everyone hates acronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
I more meant the top 10% of american wealth. This includes the upper part of the PMC.
Generic college degree does not get into the upper crust. It’s a basic signal that someone is able to follow a program, stick with something for a few years, and complete some work. Sounds basic but when you’re hiring people it’s a valuable signal.
For most people trying to send that signal, getting scholarships plus in-state tuition is the right answer. A good enough college education doesn’t have to be expensive.
To get into “upper crust of society” range you can’t treat college like a checkbox where any college will do. The education does actually matter. The cynical hot takes about college being only about networking and a piece of paper are wrong at the upper end. The educational programs at the upper end are hard. They’re demanding. You’re going to have to learn something to graduate. People do actually fail out or give up, which is rare at the generic programs.
Even if you don’t use much of the education of one of those top programs (like if you study computer science and then take a finance job) you’ve learned how to learn, how to get hard things done, how to manage yourself and your time, and how to follow through on something hard that most people cannot do. That is the real signal of a top education program if you’re going to discount the education part.
There’s always sneering about how someone knew an Ivy League grad who was actually the dumbest person they know, or anecdotes about how the smartest programmer I ever met had no college degree, or other anecdotes they try to disprove this. They’re missing the point that it’s not a 100% perfect signal nor the only way to be good at something, but it is a strong heuristic that someone is at least equipped to set goals and accomplish hard things.
It seems that most people wing most of those points in a pursuit for what they think their life's passion to be at 18 years old. And neither do any governments in America or Europe really step in to incentivize socially benefitial choices, at least afaik, instead relying on the import of immigrant experts while at the same time experiencing massive brain drain to better off countries, e.g Germans moving to Switzerland en masse.
NYS, as much as I complain about the state government, does actually do this a bit. One is the BOCES program which is an adult education system that teach trades, and highschoolers can go to for free (Think diesel mechanics, carpentry, and also things like computer repair or networking). The other is that there is a system for free associate degrees for adults 25+ (recently the requirement for them to not have a college degree was removed so that there can be reskilling), but the limitation is career focused jobs. So you can get a free associates degree in nursing, health sciences, engineering technology, metal fabrication, etc. but not in say literature.
A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.
I really don’t get what articles like this one are proposing. Instead of having an institution like Berkeley, we ought to just give students some YouTube videos?
Like I said, it’s very often just anti-intellectualism and culture war nonsense.
Attending college as a student was always partly about status and once the standards of an institution drops so does the signal that comes from holding a degree. It is only natural that people will see college as less worthy of an investment.
To be fair, I commuted for two years and didn’t really have the full social experience. But does higher education actually deserve any credit for that aspect, or would it happen naturally with any group of young people?
I definitely would have felt differently about college if money was not a concern. I got accepted to CMU but didn’t go because I didn’t want the debt, and at the state college I attended, I didn’t major in what I wanted to do. Looking back, I do feel some regret, but also, if I had chosen differently, I would still be paying for it today. Even if you’re looking for an amazing learning experience, the unbelievable cost forces it to be a primarily financial endeavor, at which point it makes more sense to forgo niceties like philosophy and study it on your own time, or audit classes or something.
But I don’t like it when people then rationalize that decision into “it actually sucks anyway,” because IME that’s not true.
In my personal experience, I studied philosophy in college, and have continued reading books off-and-on since.
There really is no book replacement for being in a class of 5-10 philosophy students, arguing about Kant or metaphysics for 3 hours, or in having a professor rip your paper apart and highlight every flaw in an argument. It just won’t happen if you’re self-studying.
Do you expect AI or a book to synthesize biological lab equipment for you? Do you think that the average person has the funds to build out an RF test lab? Or do you think everything is computer science where you coild in the past get hired because the hardware required to gain anything close to hands on experience is a commodity?
I have a child graduating high school right now. As a developer in the US, this means no child of mine is getting need based scholarships. So the question becomes whether it really makes sense to go to any of said expensive colleges vs handing the child 200k+ and going to a worse school where he gets merit scholarships worth 6 figures over the course of his stay.
When you put those kinds of prices out there, do not be surprised if people start to think it's all a ripoff.
Let’s imagine a Michelin star restaurant that has rave reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s affordable, too, which helps its popularity.
But over time, the restaurant increases its prices. The food remains exactly the same: absolutely delicious. But now the prices are 10x what they were before. And so naturally the discussion becomes: “I’m sure it’s good, but is it worth the cost?”
A rational response to higher education would be similar. Except that’s not how most people, or at least media articles, frame it. Instead of saying “the food is good but it’s not worth the cost,” they just deny that it is delicious in the first place. It’s a very particular kind of short-sightedness that has its roots in the anti-intellectual cultural history of America.
This actually happens all the time. It's hard to stay at the top and many Michelin star restaurants still close and go out of business.
It’s almost always criticized because it costs more, doesn’t guarantee a good job, etc. and not because supposed educational standards have fallen. As if the people reading the NYPost were so invested in the quality of education at Berkeley…
I’d even bet that educational standards could be near zero, but as long as the degree guaranteed a high-paying job, those same people wouldn’t care at all about the education.
Pick any nation and it's the same. Intellectuals as a class catch a bad rap because of how many of them are useful idiots for whatever the oppressive and/or extractive systems in a society are at any one time.
Like crack open any page of the history book. Whether you're reading 1970s exclusionary zoning 1930s eugenics or 1850s "inferior negro" type crap you're reading about something that a large enough to be a problem fraction of educated white collar people saw fit to peddle at everyone else.
It's perfectly understandable that a decent enough to be noticeable subset of everyone else sees this questionable track record and writes off the whole lot.
This assumes you believe that graduates are indeed gaining skills or beliefs that contribute to the betterment of society. Part of the reaction is a backlash to DEI/Woke and its a true statement that many recent graduates are not in fact contributing to but actively wishing for or working towards the downfall of US Society.
Obviously everyone's situation will be different. But now having been in the software engineering realm for many years, the level of maturity and execution I see in college graduates is deeply concerning. I generally outperform not necessarily because I'm smarter, but mostly because I just have strong discipline, communication, and conflict resolution skills gained from years in the military.
Prices are up substantially. Grade inflation is out of control, demonstrating that people are paying for the credential more than the education. Masters degrees have become a way for international students to purchase a visa. No one is learning anything.
I don't understand how we can have this conversation when the cost and quality of the product is so, so incredibly varied.
Some people loop in room and board with college costs, but you need to live somewhere even if you aren't in college. The two decisions aren't intrinsically intertwined. Being enrolled in a college might give you some options you wouldn't have otherwise, but if it's not a superior option to what you already have then you shouldn't take it. In other words college 'room and board' cost should either be ignored because it's the same price you'd pay elsewhere or it should be a net benefit if it's a subsidized, multi-tenant solution.
Meanwhile other's go to colleges that cost $10k a year for tuition and fee's, other's go to ones that run $40k+ per year. One college might focus on education and career prep/placement, another highlights their athletic teams and greek life parties.
One college might be worth it, another might not.
Why should I learn Stoke's Theorem? Why should I learn Nietzsche? Questions you can't answer until you learn them, and questions that compete with "how will I find a job" and "how will I find a girlfriend".
The problem is, if you don't learn how to answer such questions, you will not know that such questions exist. You will find a job and a partner, and think you never needed to contemplate any of the things you didn't think about.
1) is the dilution of the “college” degree in terms of quality - an online degree does not generate the same outcomes as from a highly selective institution.
2) value for money for a college degree keeps declining (unless you get it for free) - tuitions have gone up astronomically and colleges have spent lavishly on administrators, student housing and sports complexes, all without improving or changing the core product for which they are charging (education).
3) too many / the wrong people are going to college - just look at the universities that will basically take anyone, less than a third graduate, and they borrow / are in debt at graduation, and they have starting salaries that no better than highschool grads (say USC - Aiken)
4) students pursuing expensive degrees for jobs that do not pay / low ROI (we need techers and social workers but spending $200k-$400k to become a social worker that pays $45k/yr doesn’t seem to be the winning proposition).
5) if you’re somewhat mechanically minded, are willing to travel and work outside, and can pass a background check / drug screen you can earn $75k/yr inside of two years working a blue collar job.
Given these elements - it seems unsurprising that more and more people don’t see college as the answer.
You would think that people who have a college degree would be much more likely to say that college is very important. But even they are pretty lukewarm: 38% of people with a college degree say that having one is very important, vs 30% of people without one. Not that big of a difference!
College weeded out those who couldn't cut it.
Then we decided everyone needs to go to college, and that society would blindly place a college tuition bet on each person.
Now everyone is going to college, and with risk assessment thrown to the wind (a 17 year old), costs have exploded. Knowing that the debt is so intense, and that it is not dischargable (society hedged their blind bets here), college has kind of stopped it's weeding out and turned more into a pay-to-win enterprise. Legions of kids without the chops are just getting shuffled through to that magic degree so they can have a shot at paying off their debt, and hey, employers just want to see that degree to unlock those white collar salaries.
But what's slowly been happening is employers feeling like they are getting had, and people with degrees are coming in the door and leaving you totally bewildered how the hell they ever finished a degree. So the requirements are loosening and scrutiny to get in is tightening.
TL;DR: The degree market has been diluting itself in an attempt to alleviate the insane cost of a degree. Jobs are noticing degrees are meaning less.
But many failed to see that this premise would result in one way, which is actually what's happening right now: Growing outsourcing (especially observable in SWE due to its nature) purely driven by market competitiveness (inevitable dynamics of neo-liberalism) and hype surrounding it (leaving no room for other players in the game to choose any other way) which can no longer be sustained through traditionally accepted way of hiring new people who can master new inventions. Although, I highly doubt this is also sustainable.
Eventually, it was well expected for people to stop believing in a system which offers very little foreseeable success of accomplishment and thus, doing manual/repetitive labor is far more preferable for people.
I don't think this is totally the case! College costs continue to grow (well exceeding already high inflation), and the most recent way I have seen the value was framing it not around academics (or even job readiness, which is still not what college is about), but "building social skills" [1]. The college referenced in the piece is 40-70k/y depending on your status; fewer and fewer young people see taking out 100k+ of debt, 4+ years to "build social skills" as a worthwhile endeavor.
Asians are notably missing from that Gallup poll, I suspect the decline will not be so severe.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHnFgyjx08
Silicon Valley dropouts and well connected wealthy people make college educated people look like fools. The Feds are trying to end the Dept of Education while boosting the Big Tech AI companies.
The real solution should be to make college education as free as possible instead of spending money on forever wars and $488B on DHS and the cowards who work for them.