Is college worth the cost? Many recent graduates don’t think so
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If the degree is simply a means to an end, a credential, a set of skills needed for some job, then I would submit that a live-in university is a grossly inefficient way to transmit those skills, in most cases. Something more akin to community college, or perhaps what Georgia Tech or Coursera, et al. are doing is more appropriate.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to sharpen critical thinking, to learn how to solve difficult problems, to become more well-read, to become a writer, to debate ideas, and a host of other less tangible skills, then a university is called for.
In either case, what the modern undergraduate university has become accomplishes neither. It is an obscenely expensive, grotesque, hyper-social playground with the occasional cookie-cutter class, with the exception of a smattering of upper-level classes.
The university will only survive the next few years is if they return to their more austere roots and shed about 60% of the students and 80% of the staff in the process.
If lectures are all that matter, just do it on the internet. They aren't.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/30/444446022/what-...
Grad school was more like a scholarly atmosphere as you described; we'd regularly meet after class at the coffee shop and discuss nearly everything. But we all had our own apartments and private lives.
The most valuable part of my college education was the experience I got living away from home.
Getting your first job in a town away from your parents would have worked too, and may have actually been a better experience.
Maybe, that was your point.
It would be a shame if our ability to make wise, independent choices at age 18 was the major determinant for our potential in life. Many would not choose to invest in themselves.
The university experience is invaluable. Look at it whole. Don't take it for granted.
First, when is it truly undesirable to broaden your skills, to develop intangible quality, to improve your abilities as a human being beyond a specific depth? I argue (and I know it's arguable) that it's always a positive. To some degree I think the market agrees with this and, without a clear answer to "what is a good education worth," has overvalued (or rather, overpriced) the unmeasurable intangible results of a college education, which is one of our problems.
Second, I completely disagree that the modern undergraduate university accomplishes neither of these things. It is obscenely expensive (needs correction), but it is not "grotesque," it is not "hyper-social" in the derogatory sense (simply diversely social, which is neutral/positive), it is not a "playground" other than the type that nurtures minds and enhances opportunities for learning, it is not "cookie cutter" except in the sense of being an effective and repeatable system.
The university deserves to survive, it deserves to flourish, and it is an institution deserving respect for the effect it has had and will continue to have on the rise of civilization and the improvement of society.
Because it is both difficult to measure and easy to understand such an enormous impact, universities have become expensive. That is regrettable and needs recalibration from a more powerful entity (public universities have it right, but they rightfully need support from society). But don't think for a second that the castration of the university to an austere intellectualized minority luxury is the way forward for the institution of higher learning or for society itself.
As civilization becomes more complex and more difficult to comprehend, we will only need more and better universities, and ones that continue in the tradition of the liberal arts—that we may continue to be human in the face of ever greater inhumanity. Save us all if we are required to measure that.
I was using hyperbole for rhetorical reasons, but the words were chosen deliberately.
Grotesque: college athletics. Hyper-social: the Greek system, "hookup culture". Playground: grade inflation. All egregious, ubiquitous examples. Sure, there are many exceptions, but in my experience at decent to good campuses, these things are dominant influences, if not the definitive ones. This includes most of the great American campuses. (I don't know much about what it's like outside the US.)
Universities cannot be serious places if they are filled with unserious people doing unserious things. No institution could.
For the past, at least, this wasn't true at all. If anything universities were were sillier, rowdier places. If it wasn't alcohol, it was other mischief and vice, more serious sports, and more pervasive greek systems. The offenses against seriousness you list aren't even that bad, to be honest. They suffer from a sort of 'vocal minority' effect, where they seem extremely loud and horrible, but in reality are just the outward projections of a minority percentage or a minority effect.
A university is a microcosm of society. It has never been and will never be a completely serious place, because humans are not completely serious beings. Part of the glorious beauty and effectiveness of the university, even in its average form, is that it allows humans to be humans and to explore humanity; not only its serious aspects, but also its flaws, vices, and many varied possibilities. This is not a negative 'dominant influence,' but instead a highly functional, necessary, and intentional nod to the most effective development of a human being.
Just look at it: there is somehow a great seriousness coming out of this crazy world of drinking, hyper-social behavior, hookups, greek systems, grade inflation, and college sports. This should tell you something: the whole experience of college and the seriousness of its intended result are not at odds, but instead—paradoxically in a sort of crazy zen-like relationship—necessary for one another to exist. There is a profound recognition that a serious, well-balanced human being capable of greatness is not constructed by seriousness itself, nor of serious places, but rather by a plentiful variety of experience.
It is not the aim of universities to be serious places. They know better. They understand the complexities of culture, of society, and of the development of young people at a very critical stage of life. In the end, they most certainly achieve serious results very consistently—not in spite of their lack of seriousness, but in large part because of it, and especially thanks to an appreciation for it.
And on an anecdotal note, I believe in universities strongly because I did indeed experience a great one, and I know many people who had their own great experiences as well. At my university, I saw and experienced all of the things you mention. All of these unserious offenses should have distracted me from my academic focus, but they did not. They only enhanced it and helped form me into the person I am today, and I strongly, unequivocally believe that I am better for it.
In every area, the best (and sometimes only) jobs go to the best people. Where an applicant attended college can have a big influence on how they're perceived by prospective employers.[0]
The question of individual performance also comes in to play. Some reports have said that almost 75% of STEM graduates don't actually work in STEM.[1] I'm sure some of that is driven by the fact that companies want to hire above-average people - but only 50% of people fall into that category. Even in the current crazy environment in computing, there are computing graduates who can't find jobs.
There's a lot more to this issue than engineering vs. art history.[2] Sure, there's a lot of people who get degrees in fields with small labor markets. There's also the 50% of graduates with below-average transcripts. On top of that, there's people who think attending a lousy college is better than no college at all - they're shouldering a whole lot of debt for something that may ultimately bring them close to zero benefit.
There are a lot of people for whom college has paid off in spades. These people aren't necessarily lucky, they may have simply made more sensible choices.
[0] Of course there are pros and cons to this, but we know it's true.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-shortage-of-scientists-and-tec...
[2] I'd rather an art history degree from a great school than an engineering degree from a terrible school.
It's also worth mentioning that labor markets change. A lot of people working in Silicon Valley today weren't around after the first crash so they can't imagine how an engineer making six figures today with seemingly unlimited opportunities can find himself or herself making $0 tomorrow with seemingly few opportunities. But it has happened, can happen and will happen again at some point.
The no-talent temporary programmers are the ones who flood into and wash out of the market in crashes. If you have genuine talent, your time between employment is measured in hours right now, in days during normal times, and maybe in weeks during crashes.
This is probably true in just about any industry. But you're ignoring the fact that most people employed in tech don't have the kind of "genuine talent" to which you refer.
There are a lot of average/mediocre developers (who are not "no-talent temporary programmers") making six-figures building and maintaining run-of-the-mill CRUD apps at venture-backed startups who at some point are not going to be able to hop to another six figure job when their startup runs out of cash.
And they're already employed/on the track to employment!
Even there, though, there are plenty of people (myself, for instance) doing just fine in this industry without a degree. There are things I'll likely never work on, like complex computer vision stuff involving oodles of math, but heck, most people without a masters or doctorate don't work on that anyway.
I have a relative who thought of college in exactly this way. She gamed the admissions process to get into a "good" college, then took the easiest classes she could get away with for the next four years - openly mocking those who took classes that required effort. A few months after graduation, she was genuinely angry and felt betrayed that someone hadn't offered her a job with an office and a high 5 figure starting salary - presumably related to "leisure studies" which was her major. After all, she had gone to a good college like everyone had told her to. She was definitely not the only one of her friends who thought the same way.
The reason they do this is because my generation actually was brought up with the idea that going to college, any college, and getting any degree made you more successful than those without degrees. Now, some realized that this wasn't true, but it wasn't the message hammered into us from kindegarten on.
All growing up my generation was told, "Just get a degree! It doesn't matter what it's in, it doesn't matter what it costs, just get a degree!" There was no other acceptable route, so all the "good" kids went to college to get degrees.
That leaves parts of my generation racking up student loans they literally cannot pay off with the careers they will get, all the while assuming they'll be alright financially because "degree!"
Of course, college is a big bundle of things: Friends, connections, good time, hopefully skills to get a job. Of course, college is a great thing and completely necessary for some people. But there are a lot of people going into so much debt they would have been in a better position financially by not going.
All growing up we were told, "Be a generalist, not a specialist" There was no other acceptable route, so all the "good" kids identified patterns to get ahead.
That leaves many of us barking up when we notice a pattern. Of course, a generalization is a big bundle of things: abstractions, ceteris paribus, the act of generalizing, a general statement, pattern naming
The scope of parent's comment is set at generation. Or specifically "my generation", localizing the experience to a time and place.
>The answer, as with so many things in life is, "It depends." Some millennials were probably given bad information that lead them to make poor choices. Some were given bad information but nonetheless were able to see past it to make good choices. Some just had rich parents so they were able to go to college without accruing any debt at all.
I had a similar experience as parent: the hubris of college education ejaculated throughout my k-12 education. Some of us saw through the BS, but there are plenty of people wondering what the hell kind phony dream they bought into, another American dream-bubble bursting with ulterior motives.
>Lumping 80 million people together (the majority of whom will never get a degree) is silly.
Culture is amorphous and hard to grasp in the present, arguably more difficult as time passes. But there are historical themes that can be said to have affected the "mind of the generation". I would call "get a college education" one of those themes, which has been pretty consistent from my interactions with people. Example: coming from older people "are you in school?" "No." "Shame on you."
Even during the medieval (i.e. pre internet) times I attended college, the pay for various majors were well known. Highest was chemical, lowest astronomy.
Here's how: from grade school up onto high school, kids in my generation were told, by literally every adult around, "get a degree, it doesn't matter what in, you'll get a good job." The language never differed, there was never talk of trades, of military service, of starting a business, none of that. Every single adult and authority figure said the same thing.
When you're young, even if you start questioning stuff like that, when everyone you turn to says the same thing, where are you supposed to go for other points of view?
How can you go through 4 years of college and never even once google starting salaries in your chose profession? And none of your peers do either? And not notice any of the constant flow of articles on reddit and hackernews about this issue?
This is neither unknown nor secret nor obscure knowledge.
> Every single adult and authority figure said the same thing.
Not me. I've said otherwise for 40 years.
Overall, the frustrating thing to watch is that the kids saddled with six figure student loans, a generic degree and no special skills were just playing by the rules. They were trying to find their passion and studying really hard just like good boys and girls should, then life kicks them in the teeth.
I think people in college now are much more cognizant of it, but five years ago people didn't talk about student loans as much.
I find myself wanting to continue to give people the same advice I received, the same advice that served me so well, and the advice I believe in strongly—go to college. It will make you a better person. You will become yourself there, and improve yourself and grow. Better, improved, grown, whole people are the ones who earn more money, but that's a side-effect, not a goal.
But when tuition is four times what it was when I found that advice invaluable—it's much more difficult. Even in this thread I'm still giving the same narrative around the intangible and immeasurable value of a college education (I believe in it still, very strongly), but the cost is out of whack.
This is what an economic imbalance feels like, folks. There's beginning to be a huge rift between the perceived value of a university education (invaluable, extreme, incomparable experience, must-do, must-have) and the price (extremely high).
We cannot comprehend it. After all, who can put a price tag on being a better, improved, more whole person? Is it $20,000? Sure. What if we double it? $40,000? Sure, still invaluable. $80,000? Remains invaluable, intangible, unmeasurably important. $160,000? How can we deal with this? How can we put a price tag on a whole experience that remains, throughout all the number shifting, invaluable?
Needs intervention.
I still fully believe that the university experience is invaluable. But that's not the problem. The problem is that it's become overpriced because we are mentally unable to reconcile the immensity of its effect on a life with a single price tag. Thus, it is open to economic "play."
So we rail against it and come up with alternatives, and rationalize that it's not as invaluable as we thought it was after all, and, well, why don't we take some parts here and connect them with this series of tubes and voila! This is the same thing for only a fraction of the price; why would you ever go to that big overpriced agglomerated monster anyway when you can get these results right here?
All the while, I can't help but see holes in the real quality of the experience of growing up. You have to be smart about it, I guess.
Clearly, there's a reason this is an argument, and not a clear-cut case of college being valuable so you should go do it, and the reason is a price tag.
At least it's simple.
Seldom have I ever had the conversation with anyone about, "what kind of job will we get after ___?" For me, it isn't so relevant because my tech background lets me make money pretty easily. For others, it seems like the focus is almost always almost exclusively on finishing the schoolwork.
The schools themselves certainly never bring up the subject of any kind of career planning or job readiness, because that isn't really the role of the university--these aren't trade schools, after all.
Maybe they should, but if everyone's making the same mistake, then I find it hard to say "everyone is dumb/wrong," with an implication that they should all just suck it up and deal with having made some mistake. I think it makes more sense to look for social causes for why everyone's making the same mistake, and find a larger-scale solution than individual suffering of consequences.
As for this: "Not me. I've said otherwise for 40 years." I'm quite certain you weren't a part of the adult/authority figure group my peers and I had access to in the K-12 period of our lives. I find it commendable that you have said otherwise, but your ideas were absolutely not well-represented among the adults present in my generation's upbringing. So, it's great that you've been saying so, but not all that helpful in advancing the discussion.
Please, google "starting salaries for majors".
It's not any harder than that.
The thing is, unless advice I give says what people want to hear, they don't want to hear it. The most unwanted advice I give is to stop blaming others for ones' own decisions. Take responsibility for them. It's actually quite empowering.
When I went to college in the 70's, it was the custom for seniors to tape their job offer and rejection letters on their dorm door for all to see. You bet we talked about jobs after college. I specifically chose classes based on how valuable I thought they'd be to my future career choice, and so did plenty of others.
For example, lots of students quite deliberately did double majors, such as: "AY for fun, and EE for money." This was decades before google. Everyone knew that there were no jobs in AY.
I'm also not sure why you keep repeating this advice, as though I or anyone on this board need to hear it.
My point, which I'll try to make again, is that, among my peer group and in my generation, the universally prevalent idea was, "get a degree in anything, you'll get a job," full stop. (Please, don't take this as a sign that I need you to tell me to "google starting salaries for majors" again!). When you're a 16 year old without much technical aptitude--not me, but certainly my friends--that sounds like a good proposition! The schools won't do anything to disabuse the incoming students of that, either. Why would they? Every department wants a steady influx of students, so none of them are going to say, "nope, no jobs here!"
I think you probably grew up in quite a different era, which is why I keep getting a sense of "kids these days" in your messages.
I do kind of wonder what it would take to get you to empathize with people who grew up in a different time, under different circumstances, people who are part of a substantial cohort, who all acted in good faith on bad life advice and are all paying a substantial price for it.
If, in response, you're going to say "just google it!" or "personal responsibility!" then please, let's save us all the typing and let it go.
What generation is that? I was in college in the late 90s and growing up I was never told just go to college. It was always become a medical doctor or lawyer.
It is to improve yourself, invest in yourself, and become a better human being. Higher pay is a possible side-effect.
This was evident during the first semester of freshman year of college. Freshman everywhere were sure they were going to be the next bestselling author, or the next insightful historian, or the next psychologist to make a huge breakthrough. They all knew it was hard to get a cushy job in those soft fields, they just thought they'd be the one to do it out of every incoming freshman in every school in every state in the country.
I'm curious when the meaning of "liberal arts" changed. When I was in college liberal arts was a superset of STEM - well, at least SM. Physics was just as much a liberal arts field as history. A vocationally-focused degree in, say, criminology wouldn't be liberal arts, and neither would a self-guided major in peace studies. It seems like lately I've seen more and more people use the term as meaning 'all humanities, social sciences, and anything else that seems fluffy', which seems surprising to me. (Not that the comment above necessarily means it this way, though it does seem kind of close in spirit).
The people pushing to get any old degree were just following the logic of the world they grew up in. I suspect a lot of millenials will encourage their kids to get degrees in STEM fields and especially CS, even though in 30 years that won't be the best advice.
Anecdotally, I know this to be the case. On the flip side, you are very unlikely to succeed unless you have connections from the outset.
Also, with programming the vast majority of that information is available for free online. It doesn't make sense to pay that much for something that you can get for free.
again, remember this is all in the context of paying/borrowing $TONS for college. that's the tradeoff here. is being an engineer worth the debt you incur as a very young person, versus starting in a lower track but making the most of your time and money earned.
But if you want a position as an engineer you need to go to school to be one, its one of the more cut and dry professions out there (Not talking about software engineering)
In fact, its actually possible in CA to get a PE without taking the FE (just learned that) if you hold a ABET degree.
We need to consider that in the current educational system we are asking young people who are in the midst of trying to understand the world and their place in it to make a decision that very few are equipped to decide, but which they generally cannot delay, and with which they will incur great cost. And the effects of making this decision will last their entire life -- I myself know that it's possible to "pivot", but extremely difficult to do so.
Furthermore, there's no guarantee that a job even awaits those who pursue high paying degrees. For anyone who graduated in 2008, those with degrees in finance or MBAs will suffer the consequences of ill timing the rest of their life. Likewise with those who graduated with CS degrees during the dot com crash, or with advanced degrees focused on AI during the AI Winter. Sometimes things completely beyond our control result in what seemed like a prudent decision falling apart.
So my point is that our current educational structure is not well suited towards producing people who are resilient to disruption. And I mean disruption in a few senses: graduating when the market for their skills crashes, studying for a decade to get a degree in something that is beginning to be replaced by automation (I know one M.D. in a particular field who is preparing for this), and so on. It of course takes some time to acquire the skills to perform any particular job, and it might be unrealistic to expect someone with a family to even have the time to work and retrain at the same time. I know places like Udacity have things like "nanodegrees" and Coursera has certificates and whatnot, but I remain unconvinced that there are enough, say, web development jobs to meet the demands of both the unemployed and the recently graduated. And once there are too many web developers, what will they retrain to (and what will be the mobility and growth potential of us current developers)?
My comment is starting to turn into a blog post, so I'll try to wrap it up now. Ultimately I think that disruptive forces -- whether economic, automation-driven, or something else -- will only increase over time, and will exacerbate the already existing problems, causing significant social upheaval because we do not equip people to function in such an environment, but rather try to train them for their lifelong job, which is a thing that no longer exists. And I guess that I just ended up stating one of the motivations behind a liberal arts education (as opposed to something like a trade school where you generally focus upon one particular set of job skills) without even intending to end up here: it's not necessarily that you need to know art history or music theory in particular, but that in expanding the scope of your intellect and the modes of thought you are capable of, you will be much better prepared to learn what you do need to learn and to think critically about it.
We just happened to be lucky we like STEM. I know I was lucky enough to find my passion before college, then follow it, which luckily just happened to be a booming field.
Sure we can look back and pat ourselves in the back. But really, it should just be for being in the right place at the right time.
Anyway, if you researched what you were going to do, why not pursue a career with a lot less risk/more career growth opportunities? Say being a MD?
Probably it's a combination of all of the above. But when the average private school is trying to charge $50K+ per year for an undergraduate education, and the average public school is over $10K per year, something's seriously wrong.
I would tighten up the student loan system, cap it at $10K per year, and then let the universities figure out how to roll back their ridiculous tuitions that have risen many times faster than has the cost of living.
You could take an old warehouse, subdivide into about 10 lecture halls and classrooms, get a bunch of chairs and whiteboards, and hire 20 professors. That's in essence all a university should be. In this day and age, of course, you could add some online access, at a minimum stream the lectures in real time which costs almost nothing.
These glitzy $100 million "student centers", multimillion dollar athletic facilities, on-campus coffee shops and restaurants, dorms, hordes of administrative officials, assistant deans, etc. pulling down six figure incomes when they don't even teach -- that's just lifestyle crap that has nothing to do with education (although, sports teams can sometimes bring in big bucks). It all costs money -- maintenance, insurance, expansion, lawyers, advertising, marketing -- money, money, money. That's what has done in the American university system. Some of these campuses have turned into towns-plus-shopping malls and have lost their original vision.
I suppose they'll be forced to when their student numbers dive because nobody can afford it anymore, but what happens in the meantime? Only the rich get to go to school? Or if the public funding tap gets shut off, are private lenders going to step in and just make it cost more? Lowering the "expectation" that going to school is what all good American youths do is another solution that gets proposed sometimes (though maybe at odds with your premise "higher education is important and must continue"), so maybe lower attendance rates is acceptable, but I wouldn't want it to fall along class lines, or any other uneven distribution of demographics.
You could gradually step the funding down each year, but it seems like the steps would either be so small it would take generations to reform, or so big that it's basically as hard as doing it all at once.
The private schools, however, are kind of on their own. They'll probably need to cut back on the frills and hope students still want to apply. We're probably going to see a few closures of private schools over the next few years.
The latter situation has been rather commonplace with many classes I've taken here for my degree. It's just not right. I feel like my time and money are being wasted, and rather than gaining valuable knowledge and experience, this is all rather just a detrimental experience in and of itself.
No, it's not worth the cost. From what everyone has told me or everything I've read in the past, we need degrees otherwise the chance of landing a job (in my case software engineering) plummets and only some are lucky enough to be successful without one.
And so here I am, losing out on more even than just money with not much to show for it.
heck, that's nothing! wait until they lose one of your exams, or you write an essay that goes against a professor's political beliefs. that's when the real fun starts and you start making time/money cost benefit analyses with your own ethics!
make a deal with the devil, or waste several thousands dollars and 10 weeks?
...then again, if that isn't real world experience, what is???
"Two thirds of students who graduated in the last nine years and whose debt matches or exceeds the national average do not believe their degree was worth the cost."
Gallup’s executive director for education and workforce development Brandon Busteed speaking to the WSJ:
“When you look at recent graduates with student loans it gets really ugly, really fast. If alumni don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth, we risk this tidal wave of demand for higher education crashing down.”
As Bill Ackman had warned:
"When asked if he was concerned about bubbles forming in debt markets as central banks around the world continue to keep interest rates near zero, Ackman cited student loans as his biggest concern.
“If you think about the trillion dollars of student loans we have outstanding, there’s no way students are going to pay it back,” Ackman said. He foresees a future where debt-laden students protest government officials, leading to some form of forgiveness.
The $1.3 trillion in student loan debt outstanding in the U.S. has drawn parallel among some investors to the subprime mortgage bubble of the mid-t0-late 2000s."
If you compare the long-term earnings, lets say over 50 years, of taking all the money that would have been spent on college, and especially if you add private school tuition to that (which many parents would in order to get into a good college in the first place), depending on the exact numbers college can be an outright losing proposition.
Some quick examples for investing your school tuition:
$300,000 at 5% interest invested at 22 == $3,440,219.94 at age 62.
$10,000 average private school tuition invested each year from 6 to 18 + $100,000 college tuition invested at 18, 5% interest rate == $6,472,837.02 at 62
vs
$10,000 avg invested annually starting at 22, 5% interest == $2,312,827.95 at 62
$20,000 avg invested annually starting at 22, 5% interest == $4,625,655.91 at 62
Of course there's lots of ways to play with the numbers, and other considerations to take into account. Do you really, really want a specific career that requires a college degree, or do you just want a middle-class lifestyle? Is that career goal realistic, or will you just end up another depressed burnout? Plus most graduates won't be able to invest $20,000 per year starting at 22, that's highly optimistic, and most people who don't go to college won't have absolutely zero lifetime earnings either.
The opportunity cost of time spent attending schools you don't enjoy versus doing other things with the "best years of your life" is another factor, too.
It is only in this corporate-run hyper-capitalistic country that we're having this ridiculous conversation. For US graduates, college may indeed not be "worth it".
If you want to learn and absorb knowledge there are many cheaper ways to do it, e.g. libraries or MOOCs. But that won't give you a special status signaling symbol (the degree) that you can use to get past HR departments into the hiring process. That creates positional externalities that are a huge expense for society beyond just enriching people's lives through knowledge and education.
I think it is a mistake to assume that resources spent on giving people an education will be spent on healthcare or other stuff. What's most likely going to happen is that the relevant cut in public spending will be made into a tax cut.
Compared to the price, the cost is trivial. If the price wasn't hyperinflated, it wouldn't be an issue.
We see similar things in healthcare. "But someone has to pay for this $40 inhaler!" (Which only costs $1 in any other industrialized country.)
What society needs to make choices about is whether the ROI of price-gouging everyone for things that we all agree that everyone needs is actually worth it. Resources spent giving rich people more money that they won't actually need is money that could have been spent on other things like healthcare, disease research, or enriching their lives in other ways. Like, for example, education.
The only F in my life (generally straight-A student) was in Computer Science.
Currently: architecting, setting, developing coding standards for a Fortune 100. Computer programming is one of the few academic careers in which you can succeed sans papers.
1) Do these graduates know what it's like to try to get by with a high school diploma? Think of the level of education you had when you graduated from high school. Regarding just jobs, the data is clear that people with college degrees earn more.
2) College educates you not just for your first job, but for a lifetime of jobs. And not just for careers, but for life - citzenship, family, community, and your own personal growth, understanding of the world, of ideas, and your well-being. To measure its value on the basis of early jobs is a mistake. They should have paid more attention in class.
3) The idea that you can have just as much knowledge without spending 4 years taught by experts, surrounded by peers, and utilizing the enormous capital facilities colleges provide, is hard to believe.
4) Perhaps college isn't something that should be priced by the market. It is of exceptional value - even if you just consider effects on lifetime income - much more than anyone pays.
I agree largely with your points but I would point out that if #2 on your list is true in some regard, it's highly ineffective. People with college degrees start unnecessary wars. People with college degrees ruin economies with finance schemes designed for maximum personal profit over the interest in a healthy society. People with college degrees beat their partners and children. People with college degrees abuse substances, and they fall prey to the ravages of induced mental health issues and poor physical health choices like obesity or sedentary lifestyles.
In addition I've found many Americans with college degrees to be incurious about the world outside their own life and often outright hostile to intellectualism.
Not all people with college degrees are like this of course, but enough to make me think that if #2 is an intended and assumed function of post-secondary education then these institutions are not very effective in that mission when you compare the credentialed population with the rest of us.
And yes, I have no college degree. Despite high-test scores, AP credit in math, sciences, history and English, sports and other activities I was only accepted to my State Schools' Engineering program out of my applications, and only begrudgingly, which meant I had to actually write a lett er to the Dean's office about how very very much I wanted to be an Engineer. When I got there I realized how much of the 'education' offered was ridiculous nonsense. I had to drop out after a year to attend to some family issues and was forced to enter the workforce immediately doing tech support and clawed my way into professional software development.
It's been a struggle most of the time not having a degree I can simply point to, but that's been mostly due to having to overcome the biases of the credentialed versus those of us with no formal credentials. I consider myself incredibly fortunate in life though, as for example I'm composing this post from Kolkata after taking an amazing and profound trek through the Himalayas. None of my friends with college degrees have done this ;)
Certainly it could be much more effective and we shouldn't lose sight of how much room for improvement there is. But I'd bet that, as a group, college-educated people are much more productive, healthier, and probably happier. Of course, that doesn't describe any particular individual.
Have a great time on your travels. I think it's almost impossible to understand the world without experiencing cultures far from our own. (I'm assuming you aren't Indian.)
I suggest getting a degree and putting in some hustle to get out with zero or little debt. Scholarship, side jobs, whatever it takes.
I was fortunate enough to get an in-office campus job my freshman year that I'll finally be leaving now due to getting an offer to continue my summer internship part time. But the experience of working hard, learning new things (Apache webservers can in fact have very shoddy configurations and issues..), and earning money that can be spent toward tuition and other bills is invaluable.
He was on to something, of course. But I'd already known that I march to the beat of my own drum.
I hit that same crisis my sophomore-junior years of college, but powered through it and finally learned the skill of hard work (which most other students had already mastered by high school).
I am going through the same thing, except I was in a hard high school program but ended up in a university with an easy Comp Sci program. I am a senior, and the graduate class I am taking this semester is the first time I have been mentally challenged by the Comp Sci department. Because of this, I tend to "give up" easily in other things that I am interested in but are harder (mathematics), or I am not motivated to build apps for fun and portfolio, even though the ideas and the languages come easy to me.
Some of my best successes have come from that, and from seeking out other areas in the company where people were doing that. HR was laboriously manually retyping and reformatting job listings although they were using a system with an RSS feed that could pull them in automatically. A half hour (or less) of coding permanently eliminated one of their daily drudge tasks so that they could focus on other things. No one asked me to do it because no one ever even thought of it, but they loved it.
Sometimes it's not worth automating or simplifying something, but it's usually worth considering or trying. Degreed people seem to have a 'this is the way I was taught' or 'this is the way it's always been done' mentality. That's not the way to innovation and big victories.
Degreed coworkers are great for quality control though - meticulous code reviews. And they seem to be usually better at organizing/planning (although not always as good at dealing with unplanned events).
Best is a mix of people that work well together despite their differences.
There's just something to be said about someone who just simply learned through absorption rather than through lectures/assignments/tests.
High school is training you to act the way mainstream society wants adults to act- find the clique you fit into, accept your place in the hierarchy, and do as you're told.
More and more, college is the same thing except specifically preparing you to be a professional. Because competition has grown so fierce emphasis is placed on skills that will get you a job. Results are measured based on your ability to pay back your loans. You just sit and listen and sit for the prime years of your life. This prepares you for life as a professional-- where you will sit and listen and sit away the rest of your productive years.
College is what you make of it. You can make something useful out of college. But you can also make something out of spending four years on a boat drifting around the south pacific. If you are going to be a filmmaker, you can benefit from four years of film school. But you could also benefit from just making movies for four years. Want to write software for some project you care about? Guess how the first generation learned before there were Computer Science programs? Yes, some studied Math or Physics and met the pioneers of the field. But the vast majority just taught themselves-- and they didnt have the Internet!
If you already have what you need to survive and are healthy, just figure out what ratio makes you happy of FUN vs. PROFIT vs. HELPFUL TO SOCIETY and do that shit for a few years. Then, reevaluate.
Some people tell me they will study CS on their own. But to get to my level, they'll just have to spend the same three years as I did on my own studying algorithms, data structures, theory of computation etc. The only question is if that year of sitting in the classroom, talking to professors with doctorates and published papers, interacting with other students etc. is worth the time. As well as the money - a Bachelors at my decently ranked public college is currently $26k tuition plus about $4k for books etc. But you can get Pell grants, low interest government backed loans etc. It was slightly cheaper a few years ago.
I think the year's work and $30k are worth it. Spread out over a 40 year career, it's less than one thousand a year. In terms of job opportunities, salaries etc. it's definitely worth it.
One thing is students don't even know what they need to know. On my own I probably would have just dove into learning a language like C++ or Java, and then probably would have gotten more specific as I used the language I learned to implement things in some framework for that language. College went the other way - I learned a foundation of calculus, graph theory, theory of computation. Then on top of graph theory I learned data structures, on top of theory of computation I learned algorithms. So when I started using languages, I knew what was going on.
Some of the caveats in the article should be obvious, but are worth being there. People should think twice about going to an expensive private school they and their parents can't afford, if they don't have any idea what they are going to do when they graduate. Some of the kids even in level 300 CS courses openly told me they were slacking, doing the minimum to pass. I'm not sure why they were even bothering going in the first place.
Before I went to school, many job listings said "BSCS required". Even if they didn't, human resources would often interrogate me about what credits I had, what my college plans were etc. Once you get a BSCS, these things are no longer a problem. Plus you have a technical base that people without a degree who are doing CRUD PHP or Node.js do not have.
I had very little understanding of the importance of my college education the year after I graduated, but I think it's invaluable now.
The female:male gender gap in college is moving towards 60:40, people not getting married, not being able to afford to get married... we're going to need a war or something to straighten this out.
Bad news: that hasn't helped for a while. I would wager it hasn't helped since the rise of the MIC.
Note also: lots of general labor/bagging groceries people has diplomas. But that's just because pretty much everyone has a diploma. I would be extremely surprised if they thought they were actually using their degrees.
It's a crap situation, and victim blaming doesn't help (not directed at you). We just happened to be lucky that we like STEM. I know I was lucky enough to find my passion before college, then follow it, which luckily just happened to be a booming field.
What part of what the university contributed was education that you could not have otherwise obtained?
And the real problem: What part of the education, that you got from somewhere other than the university, could you prove to a potential employer that you actually had received?
When you get out, if your grades were lower because you spent time working / it affected your grades, this may affect your chances at a job. Similarly, if you're poor and your high school education didn't prepare you as well as rich kids for college, this can happen. And if you were mislead in re market opportunities (this happens more than you might imagine), you may have chosen a field that happens to be not-very-lucrative / not many jobs are available. Again, this is more likely to happen to disadvantaged / underprivileged kids regardless of how hard working or smart they might be.
Now you're in the real world, you have a hard time getting a job, and even though you learned a lot it doesn't feel appreciated or wanted by the market. So you feel that all you got was debt and a diploma, but not necessarily because you didn't take advantage of learning or growing as a person.
And now you have no way to pay it off, so you feel trapped and hustled.