College is becoming less popular

I was disparaging the political discourse.

 

College is a game of roulette with significantly worse odds if financed through debt.

Much like how young people are escaping the low wage job market thanks to available Internet cash, they will likely seek to do the same with college more and more.

 

Ooooo. Anecdotes. My closest friends from UF are executives, medical professionals, business owners, teachers, and a few SAHMs.

My friends kids are just out in the workplace and are engineers, system specialists, sales, and my UF son is in Med school.

All think the time and money was well spent. Not a single person i am in contact with from UF is struggling financially.

 

*sighs* It’s been the case for decades that, for specific professions, you have to go to college.

 

Not sure Ive been able to agree with a post of yours before but this one is pretty straight forward.

 

I’m familiar with a number of those types too. I was speaking mainly to recent grads. Many are struggling financially.

 

Happy for you!

 

College did nothing for my career. A sales type of job have allowed me to make a rather good living.

Also, most kids these days want to be influencers.

 

Again.. my recent grad observations are kids of my friends and my own... they arent struggling. I think its obvious if you misuse college you are in trouble and if you leverage it properly you do well. It is an investment and you need to treat it like that... You wouldnt tell people to not invest in real estate cuz you know someone that made a bad investment would you?

 

Awesome insight. Most kids in your day wanted to be a pro athlete or rock star... or maybe you dreamed of being a salesman.

 

This is a good point too.

 

That’s awesome. Not sure why some with 3.5+ gpa and a BS in BA or finance are struggling to find jobs that will pay more than they do. COL here in FL is pretty ridiculous so rent eats up a huge portion of income.

 

I think it is also short sighted to only evaluate college financially. People dont chose careers only for the overall NPV. If they did no one would be a teacher. Many art majors had their parents pay their tuition, or are scraping by with an upside down investment but are working in something they love. Money doesnt buy happiness, having options leads to happiness.

 

I don't disagree but on the flip side, you shouldn't get your debt forgiven because you chose a crappy degree and career path

 

I feel like our culture is almost exclusively focused on education as an early-life destination rather than a life-long journey of learning and discovery. It should be fun. I think about our Founding Fathers who were studying various fields and looking for connections between them. There's more free information available than ever. We should value education for its inherent benefits and not just for the end results of social status or income. I think if we modeled this to young folks, they might be more excited about it and not feel like everything's lost if certain things don't come easy for them early. And yeah, education can be formal or informal. Both should be supported.

 

Interesting thought experiment and argument. I wouldn't disagree about signaling theory.

Just some random thoughts...

Of course everyone would choose survival skills in the experiment--though few have them, comparatively. This is for good reasons, modern life faiap makes it unnecessary. So on the remote chance that you'd hypothetically find yourself in need of such skills, it seems predictable that everyone would choose having them.

Yet, modern life only makes it somewhat necessary (or more at there are often social pressures) to earn a degree, because of what it signals and what it "promises." I'd think that many who would have the kind of knowledge and training afforded to Princeton students but without attending, would want the degree as a validation of achievement. What good is having a bunch of knowledge if there is nothing that you can point to that validates it?

Last point only half in jest since humans desire validation in many ways. Among those who have accomplished great things but w/o the validation a degree confers often struggle with it on some level (due to feelings of inferiority despite extensive knowledge/skills/accomplishments; truly wanting a degree and/or the experience of college/regret missing out etc.).

 

Massive Online Open Courses can be really good for this. I took a science writing class with several thousand other folks offered by Stanford that was some of the best instruction I have ever received.

MOOC.org | Massive Open Online Courses | An edX Site

And, of course, there is Khan Academy on YouTube that I sometimes used to understand whatever statistical analysis/concept I was struggling with. And I always struggled with such abstraction.

 

I read recently that many upper middle class folk making 300k+ a year feel like they can barely get by. Without judging the reasonableness of such a feeling, I think it points to the bigger issue, which is that it's just plain harder to avoid/overcome economic struggle and financial insecurity in this country since the amount of resources that might be necessary might be far more than what people imagine. IMO, it makes sense on some level that recent grads would feel this way.

 

I can't speak to other countries but would also note here that we are constantly inundated by images and videos (tv, social media, etc.) of people who are either rich or pretending to be rich. It's been a joke about sitcoms that many characters are living in homes or apartments that probably wouldn't be supportable based on their occupations. Rosanne was one of the exceptions there and a reason that show felt more real to people. I think all of this really skews our perspectives in terms of trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Edit to add: The number may be slightly higher now, but only a handful of years back, I read about studies indicating that the correlation between higher income and sustained increased happiness seemed to significantly diminish or cease entirely once someone is making over $70K in income.

 

I went to tech school later in life and did every internship they would let me. Was able to pick elective classes in a way that I got two Associates when I was done. Added in some IT certifications. It worked out well.

The best part was one time I was at a bar having some drinks, and some old lady proceeded to tell me I was indoctrinated in college. I told her that I went to the local tech school, but did that did not change her opinion.