American views of higher ed decline, once again

collabs

I wouldn't say once again. I would say continues it's slide but that wouldn't make a good headline, would it?

freedomben

Another interesting point I didn't see made in TFA, is that this decline started years before AI came bursting onto the scene and has continued on the same trajectory (for those others considering the impact AI has/will had/have on the perceived value of higher-ed).

Hasz

I think there is a tendency to conflate the decline in opinions of higher education with a larger anti-science or anti-establishment view. I don't think this is totally the case! College costs continue to grow (well exceeding already high inflation), and the most recent way I have seen the value was framing it not around academics (or even job readiness, which is still not what college is about), but "building social skills" [1]. The college referenced in the piece is 40-70k/y depending on your status; fewer and fewer young people see taking out 100k+ of debt, 4+ years to "build social skills" as a worthwhile endeavor. Asians are notably missing from that Gallup poll, I suspect the decline will not be so severe. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHnFgyjx08

ff10

I think because in the last years that the American college system has been perceived as a business and for-profit system, and that buying into that system has been associated with long term debt, the economical equation is what stands in the forefront of many people's minds when they consider pursuing a college career, and it might not make sense anymore from that perspective. If you have an education system that is perceived as a purely economical option, education is not anymore perceived as a means in itself. What kind of influence this will have on the culture of learning will probably become visible in the future - and is already apparent in certain areas of life.

wanderingbit

I’m confused why this isn’t talked about more often. As a parent, most of my time that I spend thinking about money is thinking about how to pay for college. It is the second largest purchase im going to make next to my house, and it is the financial decision that sucks up the most thought. If my kids have a 1/3 chance of interacting with someone that doesn’t think college is worth it, then that impacts how I think about whether to orient the next 20 years of savings around saving for my kids college. If that person interacting with my kids is their boss, or person tasked with hiring them, then this _greatly_ impacts my decision to pay my kids’ college. Note: I don’t mean to imply “I’m deciding between whether my kids have a dedicated time period where they live on their own and just study”. I’m specifically talking about paying for an education experience that will result in a credential (a degree). Maybe I’m greatly impacted by Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education” but some part of me believes the main value of a college education is that other people think a college education is valuable. This seems to be getting less important in my lifetime. It’s hard to tell where the general sentiment is gonna be 20 years from now. :(

gedy

Businesses aren't hiring as many new grads, and many "thought leader" business types are actively snorting at not needing many or educated employees. So what do we think the "American views" would do in that situation?

righthand

All the colleges are pretty much land trusts designed to extract money from kids with loans. There is no concern for educating anyone as the teaching staff is underpaid across the board and most of the money sucked up by leadership and sports teams that do nothing for most of the athletes even let alone the students. Silicon Valley dropouts and well connected wealthy people make college educated people look like fools. The Feds are trying to end the Dept of Education while boosting the Big Tech AI companies.

bee_rider

I do wonder with polls like this, that include middle-of-the road options like “fairly important,” if there could also be some change in how we communicate our preferences. Maybe we’ve got a general creeping uncertainty about everything.

patwork

Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. People may still accept that they need a college degree to get their desired job, but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it. Prices are up substantially. Grade inflation is out of control, demonstrating that people are paying for the credential more than the education. Masters degrees have become a way for international students to purchase a visa. No one is learning anything.

gkcnlr

Notice the pattern: It begins after ~70s oil shock and coincides with the rise of neo-liberalism, upon its promise which millions were raised to believe in: "Skilled workers will always be desirable, grill yourself forever and college is the only way that you can be recognized and labeled fit as one." But many failed to see that this premise would result in one way, which is actually what's happening right now: Growing outsourcing (especially observable in SWE due to its nature) purely driven by market competitiveness (inevitable dynamics of neo-liberalism) and hype surrounding it (leaving no room for other players in the game to choose any other way) which can no longer be sustained through traditionally accepted way of hiring new people who can master new inventions. Although, I highly doubt this is also sustainable. Eventually, it was well expected for people to stop believing in a system which offers very little foreseeable success of accomplishment and thus, doing manual/repetitive labor is far more preferable for people.

balderdash

I think there are several interrelated factors at play here 1) is the dilution of the “college” degree in terms of quality - an online degree does not generate the same outcomes as from a highly selective institution. 2) value for money for a college degree keeps declining (unless you get it for free) - tuitions have gone up astronomically and colleges have spent lavishly on administrators, student housing and sports complexes, all without improving or changing the core product for which they are charging (education). 3) too many / the wrong people are going to college - just look at the universities that will basically take anyone, less than a third graduate, and they borrow / are in debt at graduation, and they have starting salaries that no better than highschool grads (say USC - Aiken) 4) students pursuing expensive degrees for jobs that do not pay / low ROI (we need techers and social workers but spending $200k-$400k to become a social worker that pays $45k/yr doesn’t seem to be the winning proposition). 5) if you’re somewhat mechanically minded, are willing to travel and work outside, and can pass a background check / drug screen you can earn $75k/yr inside of two years working a blue collar job. Given these elements - it seems unsurprising that more and more people don’t see college as the answer.

ecshafer

Higher Ed (and Ed) has declined once again as well. There are many majors that are, to be completely honest, jokes and shouldn't even exist. I personally had plenty of classes that I wrote an essay and knew I would get an A as long as I agree with the professor's/teacher's pet political views, or the same paper would mysteriously be docked a few points. High Schools teach less Shakespeare, and more random children's books that aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Liberal Arts and Humanities spend too much time on pet modern social justice causes, and not enough time on Cicero, Aristotle, etc. If we go back to a solid foundation of a classical education, actually reading the great works in school, leaning into critical thinking, and adding rigor, then higher education will actually be worth it. Math and Science I believe is still pretty solid and rigorous in higher ed but k-12 needs to be totally revamped.

aliasxneo

Not going to college was probably one of the better decisions I made. I chose to join the US Navy instead as a submariner (nuclear). Rather than signing up for 100k student debt, I was signing a 100k enlistment bonus. I was able to purchase my first house at 22. I was then immediately picked up by Google once my enlistment expired. Obviously everyone's situation will be different. But now having been in the software engineering realm for many years, the level of maturity and execution I see in college graduates is deeply concerning. I generally outperform not necessarily because I'm smarter, but mostly because I just have strong discipline, communication, and conflict resolution skills gained from years in the military.

keiferski

These articles never ever bring up the long history of anti-intellectualism in the United States. College may indeed be getting less “worth it” in pure financial terms, but it’s certainly ironic that many people only had a high view of them in the first place because of the supposed financial benefits. Now that those financial benefits are less certain, out comes the anti-intellectualism again. A more rational society would acknowledge that higher education is a good thing, and therefore try to make it affordable, not try to undermine it entirely.

lordnacho

With anything that requires patience, you have a problem competing with immediate rewards. Why should I learn Stoke's Theorem? Why should I learn Nietzsche? Questions you can't answer until you learn them, and questions that compete with "how will I find a job" and "how will I find a girlfriend". The problem is, if you don't learn how to answer such questions, you will not know that such questions exist. You will find a job and a partner, and think you never needed to contemplate any of the things you didn't think about.

ByteOfWood

Information is practically free now. And many people that are fresh out of college are still not ready for the careers their degrees supposedly prepared them for. I expect either for colleges to adapt to provide more real-world knowledge or for companies to care less about whether someone has a degree and more about their work history and personal projects. For me, 4 years of work in the field (commercial construction and service calls) was a much better decision than 4 years of college would have been. My current company hired me for my experience in the field.

WarmWash

The original point of college (modern era) was to give employers confidence that you knew the work subject and could perform proficiently. College weeded out those who couldn't cut it. Then we decided everyone needs to go to college, and that society would blindly place a college tuition bet on each person. Now everyone is going to college, and with risk assessment thrown to the wind (a 17 year old), costs have exploded. Knowing that the debt is so intense, and that it is not dischargable (society hedged their blind bets here), college has kind of stopped it's weeding out and turned more into a pay-to-win enterprise. Legions of kids without the chops are just getting shuffled through to that magic degree so they can have a shot at paying off their debt, and hey, employers just want to see that degree to unlock those white collar salaries. But what's slowly been happening is employers feeling like they are getting had, and people with degrees are coming in the door and leaving you totally bewildered how the hell they ever finished a degree. So the requirements are loosening and scrutiny to get in is tightening. TL;DR: The degree market has been diluting itself in an attempt to alleviate the insane cost of a degree. Jobs are noticing degrees are meaning less.

pigpop

Doesn't the graph make this easy to interpret? College used to not be seen as necessary by the majority of people and so only those with a strong aptitude or desire to pursue higher education did so. It became a metric to use during hiring because a degree accurately indicated that the person holding it had high aptitude or a strong interest in the field and the competency to obtain a degree. People observed this and tried to game the system by acquiring any degree to pad their resume (the motivation changed from real aptitude and interest to simply getting a higher paying job). This worked for a time while there was still an overhang in the perception of a degree but eventually the sheer volume of people with degrees made it evident that it was no longer an accurate measure. The value of a bachelor's degree in any field plummeted and was replaced by other measures (a masters, multiple degrees, PhD, exclusive schools) which were also gamed by applicants. Now the jig is up and we're in a situation where the measure is whether your family has enough money and connections to get you a laundry list of qualifications or you rely on contacts or demonstrated talent to get the higher paying jobs. The widespread discounting of the importance of higher education is a good thing, it means that people are realizing that it is no longer an exploitable measure and will hopefully lead to a correction in both the number of people getting degrees and the cost of pursuing a degree. The unfortunate part is that we're in an interim period where costs are high and there are still a lot of employers that see a degree as a box that needs to be checked.

Taikonerd

You know what surprised me about this data? They break down the % who say having a college degree is very important by different dimensions. One dimension is, people who went to college vs. not. You would think that people who have a college degree would be much more likely to say that college is very important. But even they are pretty lukewarm: 38% of people with a college degree say that having one is very important, vs 30% of people without one. Not that big of a difference!

Magicrafter13

That's what happens when the real world starts to hit us all, and we realize that the push towards college when we were growing up was largely propaganda (not to say teachers don't really believe in its usefulness, but they can't back it up with facts). I was 'lucky' enough to only spend $30k on my seemingly-useless Computer Science degree. If I could go back and do it again, out of high school, I would go to tradeschool to become an electrician. What a waste of money though, I wonder what else that $30k could have gone towards... or hell, just keep it as investments. A $30k piece of paper is in my bedroom though... I'm not really that upset about college itself, I'm upset about all the people around me who fed me the lie (that they too believed), that getting a degree somehow sets you apart and unlocks all the high paying jobs. I think a master's degree holds more weight, but still.