College is becoming less popular

There is a difference between being a plumber and owning a plumbing company though, and those jobs very hard work unless you love digging holes, the smell of PVC flue, or going into attics in the summer in the Florida summer, all with high liability. But you right, they are mostly well paid, it's just not for everyone. I know a lady with a library science degree who works and community college and makes $100K+ a year in the A/C, with no liability, in a job that she loves and thinks is fun.

 

I got 59 credit hours from community college, plus another 18 from CLEP testing. I finished my degree at UF with 168 credit hours total. For some strange reason, the CC required you to take 4 credits in physical education, so I took weightlifting, volleyball, tennis, and archery. It made things interesting.

The only thing that disappointed me was that the CC required you to take a certain number of math classes, and Calculus I, II, and III were not enough by themselves, so I had to take a class in Logic, which was taught at a middle school (or remedial high school) level. Really boring. That, and my first English Comp teacher gave me a "B" for no apparent reason. I paid him back the next semester, when he left a sentence on the board for dissection that was about the Queen (he was a middle-aged British guy) before class started, and I happened to see it and changed two nouns on it to "sex and drugs", imitating his handwriting. When he arrived, he couldn't understand the snickering, and then proceeded to read the sentence exactly as written, and then spun his head around and said "WHAT?!!!". Probably the funniest prank I pulled on an instructor in college. I'm pretty sure he inspected all his sentences before he read them after that.

 

There is a friend of my family, a 28 year old who’s never quite found his way. Family is pleaded with him to go beyond his GED and pursue college. I’m encouraging him to look into learning a trade.

 

Thoughtful piece with some excellent questions near the end on the problem of higher education becoming less popular:
The Real Lessons We Should Draw from Claudine Gay’s Resignation
Every academic should read this recent article on the rapid erosion of interest in and support for higher education in America. Though conservatives like to blame this shift, like everything else, on whatever they call “wokeism,” the essay points to a far deeper truth. As students have had to bear more and more of the costs of their education, they have lost confidence that college is worth it – in part because its financial impact, particularly for students of limited means, and those who may not finish, may well be negative. Nor should we accept this shift as the inevitable result of changing economic forces or demographics: while in America college attendance is declining, in Europe, where students can still go to university for a few hundred dollars a year, or even for free, attendance has risen in recent years.

Where is the program to address all of this? We should ask this of every aspiring university President and Dean – and of one another. Student debt organizing has been a rare bright spot. But we need much more. While Bernie proposed a schematic free college plan, there is very little serious discussion about how to refund public education, much less organized groups poised to deliver it. This is particularly ominous, because Trump has a new proposal of his own: a free online “American Academy,” paid for with a tax on elite universities, that would accept credits for past coursework and be a recognized credential for federal positions and contractors.

Where, too, is the conversation about weaning universities from the precarious reliance some have on a small number of very wealthy donors? Or the bold new ideas for how to make our campuses more open to ordinary people? Could we build free new adult education programs on the model of the extraordinarily successful prison education programs, for example? Provide real support for more early-college high schools or other programs to improve K-12 education, and pave the path to universities for more students now locked out? Is it time to commit at least 90% of incoming slots at law schools and universities to students who graduated from public schools – to match the proportion of them in the country, and to reverse the massive bias toward wealthy prep school students at elite colleges today? Would new partnerships and degree programs between public and private universities help to spread the wealth? Or are there better ways to undo the vast resource inequalities between our academic institutions? Successfully expanding access to higher education in this country requires a focus on the state schools and community colleges that provide the vast majority of it, and also recognizing that the kind of loan forgiveness programs that liberals love will not work as well as commitments to free tuition for working class students.

Free speech at universities hangs in the balance, to be sure. But defending it will require much more than just resisting the assaults coming from billionaires and right-wing influencers. It will require reconnecting with the purposes and highest aims of the academy and building a political economy of higher education that can begin to truly deliver on them.

 

Unemployment is virtually zero. What are you talking about?

 

Here is an interesting article about education. It claims that the majority of money spent on pushing STEM education is wasted because the majority of students that get a STEM degree don't wind up working in STEM jobs. Some try a STEM job and find out it is too much work, so they find a career outside of STEM. I suspect many are pushed by parents into getting a STEM education, even if their heart isn't really in it, or their attitude towards work is not fully developed. Some people that are in it for the money find out there is more money to be made in the financial sector than in the STEM world. Only 28% of people with a STEM degree are working in STEM jobs.

Maybe we need to do a better job finding out what jobs people are both capable of doing and are interested in doing. Some people getting a STEM degree may not know what they are signing up for. It might be a good idea to bring STEM professionals into the classroom to describe what they do and what they have to put up with.

Opinion: Why pushing STEM majors is turning out to be a terrible investment

 

That's an interesting information. I know a few people who got a STEM degree, but work in totally different spheres.
But I agree that first of all, it's important to study something you're interested in. If you pick up a major just because it's said to be a prospective one and you will be able to find a good job afterward - it's not the right thing to do.
But from my experience can say that it's hard for many students to understand what they want to study and it may be the reason fo choosing the wrong major.

 

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/18/technical-worker-shortage-trade-education-construction

 

An interesting article about Mike Rowe's (the Dirty Jobs guy) impression of the value of a college degree. People who go into a trade like electrician make more after five years of apprenticeship than the average college graduate makes after four years of college. Instead of racking up debt while learning the trade, the apprentice is making (some) money.

I disagree with the idea that a college degree is automatically not worth pursuing. If what you really want to do requires a college degree, you have to get it. You need to be aware of how much debt you will rack up and how much you will earn when you get out of college. (I don't think most students or parents even go through the math on this.) If you don't know what you want to do, going to college at a university is probably a bad idea (unless the parents have so much money that they can afford to lose $150k or more). If you don't know what you want to do, or if your financial situation is borderline with the degree you are getting and the salary you will get, you should definitely consider junior college (community college). You rack up very little debt, and get an education that can transfer into a university if you should decide to continue your education. And you get to time to think about what you want to do in life. Speaking from experience (mine and a high school friend), going to junior college does not preclude you from becoming an engineer or doctor.

Parents and students thinking that a university education is mandatory for success in life (combined with easy access to loans) are the reason for skyrocketing college costs.

'Shameful': Mike Rowe trashes college degrees, says Harvard grads are taking their 'degrees off the wall' — is welding, pipe fitting or HVAC a better path to six figures?

The disparity is even more than what averages say. The college graduate salaries are skewed upward by the doctors (1% of the college students), lawyers (1%), and engineers (6%). So a student in any of the other degrees will probably average $45-55k.

 

Strange. I used to be in a STEM job (I retired from it), and I can only think of one person that I ever ran into that left STEM.

That's just my personal experience, but for the opinion guy to say "most" ... that seems hard to believe.

 

Strange(gator) is a different poster. I am chem(gator).

A lot of people get out of college with a STEM degree and never get a job in their field. They may have a parent that runs a business, or a friend who's parent runs a business, and they wind up with a job in business or sales. I have a friend who got a chemical engineering degree and became a ship captain, because that is what he liked to do.

You have to think of what STEM consists of:

Science
Technology
Engineering
Math

First of all, most people with a math degree do not work in a math job, unless it is as a math teacher or professor. Science includes a wide variety of disciplines, including biology, botany, geology, chemistry, physics, zoology, etc. There are probably limited numbers of jobs in those disciplines, so they choose something else. Some women wind up raising a family after only a few years working in their chosen field and never go back.

 

Mike Rowe is a nut who doesn’t understand statistics.

 

A bachelors degree in any of the liberal arts science and math majors are generally for people who plan on graduate school or teaching. I knew a physics undergrad who went back to Publix and became a Publix manager. They didn’t “use” the degree, but I doubt they had issue paying any debt back. No clue what their original intentions were with majoring in physics.

I recall at UF knowing a few who planned on pre-med, but couldn’t cut Organic Chem or some other infamous UF class. So they’d switch over to something like psychology or education.

 

I think everyone in engineering knows of some classmates that dropped out and went for a business degree or some other option. I would say about 10% of my ChemE class dropped out of engineering before it was all said and done.

I worked my way through college at Publix. I had an assistant manager try to get me to give up on college and work for Publix full-time, because within a decade I could be an assistant manager and make $32k/yr (late-80's). I told him I would be making at least that much when I graduated in two years. Store managers work too many hours, and deal with too many people issues, from employee theft to slip-on-the-sidewalk lawsuits.

 

So, if someone goes to school to get whatever we now call STEM degrees and they graduate, but end up working in a field outside of our current definition of STEM, that is wasted money??

 

Don’t think it takes a decade to be assistant manager at Publix. Especially if a person goes that way after college (almost hard to imagine anyone accepting anything less if committing to stay with them after college). But those assistant managers toil away for long hours and I assume the vast majority never get their own store. So on an “hourly” basis it’s probably not great until they get store manager or corporate.

 

When I was in high school, I worked in a Winn-Dixie produce department. One summer, a guy named John was home from Ga Tech. He was an aerospace engineering major. Another guy, Mike was getting his EE degree from USF. I went on to get physics, math and engineering degrees. Probably one of the smartest Winn-Dixie produce departments ever. They offered some pretty good incentives to all 3 of us to enter their management program (once I hit 18 in my case), including paying for a BS and Masters if they were applicable to the business.

With all of that, I made more the first 2 years out of college in the "go-go" days of the semiconductor industry than an assistant manager at W/D would have made in a decade back then. Heck, my hiring bonus at DEC was almost 2 years salary for an assistant manager.

 

Well that is true, I'm an engineer, so I was thinking about it from the more "employable" STEM degrees. lolz

 

Not necessarily. If there is something about your knowledge of engineering that could help a job outside of the STEM fields, then that would give you an advantage over other employees, if the job was peripherally related to technology or engineering. An engineer working as a real estate agent, for example, could explain the difference between a geothermal heat pump system and a regular heat pump or A/C system, or say what a particular water filter would do for him with regard to whatever is in the local water supply. And if the person goes on to become an educator (even at the high school level), then the person can pass the knowledge to the next generation, which is a positive. My friend the ship's captain has done some work in a large shipyard helping to design and construct new ships for hauling large equipment, and I'm sure his general knowledge of engineering helps him with getting the details right.

In the larger scale of things, I would think that getting a STEM degree and not working in a STEM job is at least a partial waste of money for the person and society, IMO. In the example above, a non-engineer could probably study these things on his own and provide enough of an explanation to clients that they could make an informed decision. University education is very expensive. And a person who going to college and does not use their degree (or doesn't use it much) is taking up a space in the university program that someone else could take who might be able to do much more with the degree.