US College Campuses Look a Lot Like 1970s Detroit

Edward Dutton did a piece on this topic. After WWII jobs were very plentiful. If one wanted to work in a particular field highly likely they would get the job without much effort. My father was an accountant for a large corporation with a flimsy jr college degree. He had that job for 44 years. Impossible pulling off that feat today.

Things IMO changed in the 80's with corporate raiding and then articles in mass publications like Parade magazine on how much more you make with a degree. It wasn't false information at the time but there was this real pressure that if you didn't go to college you put shame on the family. You had to rise higher that your parents.

Eventually those jobs that didn't take much effort dried up. Unfortunately the articles on the college degree coin didn't so here we are. A bunch of paper on the wall and everyone fighting for the same small square footage on top the hill so to speak. No way to fix it other than raising college standards which everyone knows ain't happening.

Opinion pieces on how college campuses/education going downhill are popular these days, but I wish they stop using Yale, Cornell and other private institutions as an example of how shitty it's becoming. They're by definition private, if they want 2 administrators, a personal driver, and a maid per student for $200k a year, let them do that, market will sort itself.

Is situation dire at public universities like University of Michigan, Ohio state, UT Austin, university of Washington, UCLA? Is the in-state tuition ridiculously high?

My hunch is it's fine for those. Cost of living and housing might be an issue for the campuses that are in popular cities (NYC, Boston, Seattle,...) but for middle of nowhere college towns, it's all good.

If you look at the supposed age where college truly was a golden ticket, the assumption was that it was the skills taught that got you the job, even if the skills were tenuously related to the job. My grandfather studied geography and history and spent time teaching those before ending up as an accountant and being hired as a "university graduate" at GM. That would never happen today. The accounting department would want someone who studied accounting.

Was it actually about the skills or was it about the capability signaling? With a degree, you had a reasonable argument back then to make that you were in the top 10% of possible workers for skilled tasks. Now with post secondary education, you are maybe top 50%? Now that everyone goes to university, the signal has disappeared for all but the highest ranked institutions.

Anybody who looks will see the US university system has become bloated, dysfunctional, and exploitative. You can find a million articles like this detailing it. As long as universities get to be gatekeepers to a piece of paper that is required to get a white collar job and there is a lack of political will to fix universities nothing will change.

Well, for the first time in a long time the cost of attending a private non-profit college has gone down YOY.

Colleges react to the market. What students and their families want. It is a competitive market with a ton of choice. And colleges go under every year. You usually just don’t know about those colleges because they are low reputation.