American views of higher ed decline, once again
bryanalexander.org
bryanalexander.org
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.
:(
[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.
I was referring to private college degrees. Regardless, who you know and how much capital you can access matters many of orders of magnitude more than the text on your transcript or your actual existence
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.
My dad was a teacher and my mom was a part-time teacher and they paid for my BS. We weren't wealthy, either.
Of course, inflation adjusted college costs were 1/5 what they are today...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
In England (Scotland, Wales and NI are a bit different) its £10k/year for fees (except three or four universities), plus living costs (which will vary depending where you are). Fees plus an amount for living costs (reduced as parental income rises, and you get more if studying in London) can be funded by a student loan, which has returned to interest at the rate of inflation (it was higher, and close to commercial rates for a few years, very unfairly on those in that scheme).
This is not as good as some European countries, but it seems to be a lot cheaper than the US. its hard to compare because fees vary a lot more and American universities are more generous with financial aid. What I can say is that parents in the UK do not spend a lot of time worrying about how to pay for university.
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
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.
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.
Its the same in the UK. The government (specifically Tony Blair) decided a long time ago to greatly increase the number of school leavers going to tertiary education. Parents and teachers push university as they only way to get a good job - this is not even true given a trade will give you a better income than many degrees.
Funding this massive expansion has also spread government funds thin so it has made university more expensive, which pushes people to make a financial decision. At my daughters' sixth form college far fewer people are doing music or drama and far more doing maths at A level, as they want to do "useful" subjects at university.
The impact is even worse if you are male. The number of men doing subjects like archaeology (which my younger daughter is currently doing) has fallen sharply, and its becoming a "rich girl" subject. Its actually a secure career (there is a shortage!) if not well paid, but people do not know that. When people think about jobs they think STEM or business.
We even have a system here whereby you can do both for vocational subjects. My older daughter did a degree apprenticeship (in engineering in her case, but also available in law, accountancy, etc.) which means you work while doing a degree. Fees paid and you get a salary. People are waking up to this but it needs to expand.
That ship has sailed. College is a now a job gate-keeper and are extorting young people for certificates that employers 'require' to hire them.
I'm all for education, and there are indeed jobs for which degrees should be required (engineering, nursing, etc), but many many jobs just require some generic degree in anything. It's a bullshit requirement and the costs are massive and rising and saddle young people with debt some can never get away from.
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.
I get the first point and maybe the second one as well (although I personally had no idea why I wanted to study math right out of school) but thinking that a 18 year old should figure out how to pay for their education in their own is kinda crazy to me.
Maybe it’s a cultural difference but I think parents nowadays should be responsible to provide a little more than just childhood and early teenage years. You can’t just leave your kid on a street because he cannot justify his passion for something.
But the cultural problem we have today is exactly that parents feel that they are responsible to provide a college education for their kids. Doing well in higher education is something that cannot be handed to someone. A student needs to be invested in their education, they need to have some real skin in the game, they need to feel real-world consequences for their actions.
Young adulthood is a time of transition -- they should be transitioning fully away from accountability to their teachers and their parents, to an accountability to themselves and the realities of adult life. They need to learn to be responsible for real world things, not just a report card. Part of that responsibility is having some urgency, desire, and ambition to do something with your life.
Giving a undecided kid a mandate to go to school is the exact opposite of what they need. They don't need someone to tell them what to do. They need to learn how to tell themselves what to do. Parents instinctually want to "help", but doing this for them does not help.
It is nice for parents to help. But there are way too many parents who think that if they just enroll their kids in a good college, that college will magically give them direction in life, ambition, and life skills. But if they didn't have a good grasp on these things before enrolling, they're already set up their children for failure.
I know people who work in higher ed, and they thank god for FERPA, because they are inundated with more calls than ever from helicopter parents asking what their grades are, asking where they were on the weekends, why they won't call their parents back, etc. "I am paying for this education and I demand to know [x] about my child", etc.
Any student who is actually prepared for college should already have a pretty reasonable idea what direction they want to go with their studies, what it is going to cost, how it is going to be paid for, and generally what they're going to do with their education. If they don't have a clue, blowing $100k is not going to fix that problem -- it's going to make it worse.
In my opinion, undecided kids would be much better off dabbling in college at a 2 year alternative. There are fewer distractions and less impactful consequences for "figuring it out".
Americans have told me in the past how much they personally are expecting to spend and its often a huge amount, but I have no feel for what it typical, or how much it varies.
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.
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.
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.
Not at all.
>I think that influence is a handful of classes at best.
I'd say its less about specific courses than the culture and peer pressure to conform to pretty extreme positions.
E.g. its hard to even debate ideas when they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden to even bring up. https://www.fire.org/college-free-speech-rankings
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.
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.
Instead of higher education being something that people do because they want to do it, because they're passionate about a subject or simply want to grow and learn - it became viewed as an edge that would help you get jobs more quickly or better-paying ones. You spent some of your money and time now, but would have a higher salary later in life.
Then, globalism and the internet came in. You are no longer competing with people in your home town. Or your state. Or your country. You are competing with everyone, everywhere, all the time. Employers, for better or worse, only have so many slots available. If one candidate has a degree and the other doesn't, it makes sense to use it as a filter - if only to reduce the shear amount of applicants you need to consider. Every applicant is time and effort and money, and reducing it to a narrow list quickly is paramount.
Now, a degree went from an edge to a necessity. If you did not have it, you would simply be filtered out and your chance of getting anything beyond minimum wage was effectively zero. That meant that almost any cost would be accepted, because the consequences would be so high if not taken. But, schools only have limited seats. Nearly fixed supply and increasing demand meant the price skyrocketed.
Now, we're in the next phase. The balance has tipped. Now, competition is so fierce globally that even with a degree chances of a good job are slim. You might be overqualified, with years of experience and a relevant degree - but if you're competing with 1000 other similar applicants than does it even matter? With those kind of odds and the consideration of lifelong debt, now people are starting to see it as a waste of time.
I don't see a solution.
I was 'lucky' enough to only spend $30k on my seemingly-useless Computer Science degree. If I could go back and do it again, out of high school, I would go to tradeschool to become an electrician.
What a waste of money though, I wonder what else that $30k could have gone towards... or hell, just keep it as investments. A $30k piece of paper is in my bedroom though...
I'm not really that upset about college itself, I'm upset about all the people around me who fed me the lie (that they too believed), that getting a degree somehow sets you apart and unlocks all the high paying jobs. I think a master's degree holds more weight, but still.
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.
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.
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.
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.