alt Hacker NewsAmericans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
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The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings.
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.
It seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane.
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.
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money.
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.
Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko...
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.
I went to uni to learn to learn. It helped that it was free, but it was a rigorous education with formal proofs (starting in week 1), proper research, scientific writing etc. Very few people will learn that outside universities, and, while not strictly needed for most jobs, it really helps as a tool to shut 'talkers' up to this day. Socially it was good as well; got my first and second project for my tiny company I set up in uni from the father's of two study mates: the first project was 100k, the second 1.6m (both guilders at time), so there is that; I would have never known these people otherwise.
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
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.
Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.
Meanwhile, China is churning out STEM graduates at breakneck pace. Sure, not every single one is Nobel prize material, but 7 mainland China universities are now in Times' top 100, and another 5 Hong Kong ones as well.
In unrelated news: China graduates more engineers then ever before.
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
Maybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..
My degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).
While Western countries are making education increasingly private, expensive, and accessible only to the elite, in China, free education accessible to all is training engineers who then go on to work for companies that outperform those of other countries.
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
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.
IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value.
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..
Education in modern times is only about training and certifying workforce so that employers can easily filter the prospective employees.
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.
Polls really need to start adding filter questions like "Do vaccines work?" "Did humans evolve from small mammals?" because some people not believing something works is actually a positive signal.
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.
This is worrisome. College experience does provide unique benefits compared to self-learning.
I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:
- 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.
I’m really shocked that everyone is running to cyclical industrial/construction type jobs that are great in an economic expansion, but awful in a downturn.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
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.
Four-year anything is not seen as worth the cost, when every platform firehoses you with stories about people who became billionaires in 7 months.
Being long degeneracy [1] is the number one strategy right now
Doesn’t help when leaders are trashing it and classifying things as not “professional” to further put up more barriers to entry. Along with the constant attacks about them being indoctrination centers, pulling funding for being too liberal, or not pro-Israel enough, or whatever else this administration has officially been able to strongarm many institutions about.
Almost nobody seem to see college as a place where people can develop the skills to learn itself? Did it get that bad?
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.
The problem is that no one can really articulate what the point of higher education is.
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.
I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.
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.
"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance.
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."
They're wonderful but, yes, the cost is out of control.
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.
No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
Because they are not. If I was 18 years old right now, I'd be going into a trade of some sort. No debt, immediately earning a decent amount of money. AI will push even more kids towards this route.
With AI, h1b, other visa workers, and outsourcing it makes sense they see it as a waste. Those things aren’t going to change, either.
I think we, as a society, put way too much emphasis on everyone going to a four-year college and now everyone has a degree and they’re basically useless.
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.
There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. The social environment can be replicated for free. You're not paying six figures for an education, you're paying six figures for exactly two things:
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
1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
*some
I dropped out after my university added various "studies" courses to the required list.
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.
Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class
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.
Objectively, universities function as indoctrination centers that lower the reproductive rate of the most intelligent in the population. They take women away from their support networks/family, preoccupy them for four of their most fertile years, and then saddle them with debt that ties them up for another five to ten years. It's horribly dysgenic. At a minimum, pregnancy during college should be encouraged, there should be free daycare, and the college loan racket should be blown into a million tiny pieces.
My kids will still go to a four-year university, but for the education and experience, not for any vocational aspirations. I have no delusions about the marketability of an undergraduate degree.
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.
Employers just hire experienced h1bs instead, they won’t leave after being trained, no reason to hire an American
The pendulum swings. College was only for the elite. Then it slowly expanded until it got to the point of, “everyone should go to college, doesn’t matter what you study.” Now it’s swinging back. Hopefully we manage to get to a reasonable place and not go all the way back to college only being for elites.
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What's the point? You're either going to be replaced by AI or a robot (or both) anyway.
Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents.
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.