People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.

People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.

And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.

And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.

Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.

Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?

Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.

They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.

A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.

Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.

My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.

When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.

I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).

Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.

I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.

The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.

But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.

There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.

But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.

No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.

[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...

It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).

When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.

Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.

- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!

- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!

In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.

It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.

When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.

It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.

It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.

However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.

I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.

However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.

Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.

I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing.

We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.

My impression is, unless you can get into a top X college, it isn't worth it.

This also depends on the cost of course. My university in Thailand back then was 1,000 USD per year, so that seems worth it, even tho it isn't in the top 20.

Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.

I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.

Employers probably decided to avoid them.

That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..

If that training and certification can be made available via other easier means, that's the end of brick-mortar universities with grand campuses. The dinosaur has to evolve into a bird.

One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.

Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.

The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."

Thiel and his ilk are eager to shove the US back into feudalism, with themselves at the top like some kind of warmed-over Borgia family. An educated populace that is capable of operating a democracy competently is absolutely intolerable for them.

I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.

If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.

If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.

If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?

If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.

Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.

So now, almost all white collar jobs require a degree. You may not ever be able to move into management without one either.

The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund

The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.

A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.

The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.

The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.

Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.

1. Someone to write lesson plans for you

2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process

A lot of people would likely have been better off going to a trade school or going into a trade apprenticeship.

Parents should focus on helping their kids figure out what they want to do and developing a path to achieve it. The path may take them to university, a trade, or something else.

Look forward to an article like this about every economic sector every few months

I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere.

As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions.

I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.

As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.

Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.

we've allowed capitalists and rent-seekers into our educational system and it's nigh impossible to root them out. same goes for healthcare, housing, etc.

Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now

1: https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy

https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Spence.pdf

It’s not just about learning skills, but it’s a natural and rational mechanism to filter talents.

White rich people hated competition from poor and brown people. That whole even playfield thing was their nightmare.

Ask the rich families if college degrees are still important. You’ll get a different answer.