College is becoming less popular

Transparency on outcomes (likelihood of getting a job, range of starting salaries, expected career earnings, etc.); more government funding; less loans (to make it more affordable and attainable); and give students who want it more freedom to design their educations. I'm no expert, but that all seems like a good start.

Additionally, we need to give kids in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas more resources to help funnel them into higher education (particularly help with preparing for and navigating the process), whether that's trade school, community college, or four-year universities (depending on the student). Make some of those options are free for people who can't afford it. For other options, make it affordable and expand scholarship opportunities.

(And while we're at it, we need to adequately fund K-12 schools in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas so those kids aren't coming into higher education without the tools needed to succeed.)

End of the day, the more people we can funnel into some form of higher education, the better for our society. Looking beyond the economic benefits of having a more educated and skilled workforce, there are so many societal benefits to having a more educated populace.

 

Raise taxes on people in the top tax brackets.

 

Do you think we spend $1 trillion per year on student loans? According to this site, we loaned out less than $100 billion in 2021-22:
https://www.lendingtree.com/student/student-loan-debt-statistics/
Students and parents borrowed an estimated $94.7 billion in the 2021-22 academic year. 46% of this was federal unsubsidized loans, 16% was federal subsidized loans, 13% was Grad PLUS loans, 13% was private or other nonfederal loans and 11% was Parent PLUS loans.

 

That’s always the answer. Yet even if we did that it would barley make a dent.

How about cutting the budget that exploded during Covid and didn’t even think about returning back to being close to pre covid numbers…

Sure if if look at spending as a % of GDP it may be close to peaks of historic norms. But why are we spending so much more now? Is there a war, a pandemic?
Nope the Gov loves to spend money.
Build back better… LMAO

 

The tax cuts a certain group promised would pay for themselves caused our deficit to increase massively even before COVID. So I'd say raising taxes would do more than barely make a dent. That said, this thread isn't about the budget deficit. He asked how to pay for it. I offered a solution.

 

Fair enough.
However the cuts were a small part of why the debt went it. Once again it was increased spending.
Tax revenues went up with the cuts if my memory serves me correctly.

But the solution really doesn’t pay for it as much as some wish.

Trouble is the deficits are going up like crazy even though covid spending is long done and Biden raised the rates on top earners and it will get worse due to higher interest rates.

 

This engineer and conservative would vehemently disagree. This isn't a partisan issue. I wholehearted support the value and ROI of a college education.

 

Silly. When I hire college grads they don’t come pre-trained on how to do the job I need them to do. College in most instances isn’t a certification course.

However, I know that whoever I hire has a 93% success rate if they have a degree. We prefer business degrees as an interest gauge but they have no more success rate factors than a liberal arts major as long as they are interested in and good at analysis and research.

 

Well, it’s a trend not an absolute. It was 70/30 dems valuing college and 60/40 republicans prior to 2015. Now pubs are 35/65 with a minority valuing college. This board seems near there.

My guess is that 35% pubs who appreciate college are aligned with the 35% still with the pipedream the GOP is the party of small govt fiscal responsibility vs the 65% GOP culture warriors. But that’s a guess.

 

College was mandatory for me in the early 80s. Computer Science meant mainframe computing and well no ordinary person had access to a mainframe back then. The only way to learn on them was college. Well, not true, but 90% of that is true. If you had a job as an operator, you could learn since you had the access. COBOL, JCL, CICS, etc. weren't languages you could learn at home. But 2023 is far different. You don't need a degree in Computer Science to earn $1,000/hr. You have access to online classes like Udemy, where most Indians learned how to develop. Anyone with a computer and internet can learn everything they need to know from their home-office. All you need to have is a brain and the willingness to put in the hard work. I learned Java and everything after mainframes on my own. I take Udemy courses to learn React, Python, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and about 20 other technologies on my own.

I will say there are many disciplines that still need college - medical, nuclear, most of the sciences where you need access to labs. It's impossible to become a surgeon at home, because you need residency and accreditation that online courses can't provide. But for pretty much everything else, college is no longer necessary. I can't think of any degree today outside of some specialized disciplines that need a college degree.

 

Meh. That’s like saying you don’t need a college education to fly an airplane since they dont teach you how to do that in college. It’s a competitive industry so nearly all pilots have a degree. The airlines look at a college degree as evidence that a pilot is trainable, motivated, has good study skills, and is a self-starter. It’s really the only vetting process in the first world.

 

Computer Programming is probably a bit unique. But I think you are overstating the shift from degree to non-degree. Those opportunities were always there to demonstrably good programmers. Hell, how many of our top tech companies were founded by college dropouts? I’d almost wonder which ones WEREN’T. Still, unless a computer engineer or programmer is already converting their skills to income or is just naturally a good programmer, college (a frugal state u) is still a good idea as a baseline, esp when one wants to go more “engineering” than programming. A programmer is more like a language thing. If you want an Arabic or Mandarin interpreter, you don’t necessarily need a person with a degree in Arabic or Chinese, what you want is a native speaker with strong bilingual skills. Degree programs in those fields exist, but obviously many people around the world are already bilingual without having a degree in a second language.

Maybe with the economy being more “service oriented” there is a mismatch in terms of more degreed people than the economy needs (or people getting degrees they never use) - don’t need a physics degree to work in real estate or hospitality. But if you tell people don’t get that degree, most likely you are locking them in to menial labor, service industry type jobs, or at best a trade. Not that there’s anything wrong with a trade if that’s what a person wants to be good at, but even there it takes time to learn - and being educated on building codes and business/ finance and such would still likely be useful to them progressing in their career… so even in trades it’s not like we should discount the possible value of a degree to supplement it.

There are less “middle manager” type jobs with companies continually becoming more streamlined, but unless we are talking unskilled labor or “talent” type jobs (music, art, athletics), the degree is a good gateway in most professional fields. Even in a field like nursing there is a *huge* gap in quality between nurses coming out of real Universities and those that come out of community colleges or diploma mill type situations. These are people who can kill with their incompetence AND are also being given more autonomy (which is quite scary when you recognize the level of incompetence some of them display). I think almost any field benefits if it encourages or required some type of 4 year degree in a specific field. It’s crazy to think of teachers teaching in a field where they have zero qualifications, hell even policing would surely have less “cops gone wild” issues if more departments required more education as a gateway - like a bachelors level survey of the law or of criminal justice.

 

Again, I don't think this is a partisan issue. It's an economic one. The first few paragraphs bear that out. The shift of the financial burden onto the individual from the gov't along with the sharp increase in the expense of a college education making this a bet rather than a sure thing. You keep wanting to assign the usual "Republican BAAAD!" mantra this board is infamous for, but that's simply not the root cause of the problem.

 

I was all in until you mentioned nuclear. No way Homer Simpson has a college degree

 

It's overpriced and subsidization only exacerbates the problems. The more people find viable and cheaper alternatives, the greater of a trend this will become. Government-subsidized student loans and public funding tethered to competitive private sector incentives is a recipe for disaster that results in essentially a blank check for universities paired with charging a left nut for tuition. UF is relatively one of the best as far as cost, but college cost broadly speaking is a problem.

Never really had this problem at UF, but teaching people what to think rather than how to think is also a problem with some programs and some places.