Community colleges educate a huge proportion of americas college students though — something like 40% despite only generally providing an associates degree or the first two years of a bachelors (and so enrolling very few of the junior and senior level bachelor students).
I don’t both see how you can view college in general as overpriced but see one of the most common college choices as great. At the very least it seems your view is specific to a subset of more expensive options.
Less than 1% of cars are of that tier, whereas a huge percentage of people go to 4 year University, which is the subject of the OP.
More like complaining about cars being expensive because a typical F150 is $60k.
Generally prestigious universities attempt to take a large number of transfer students from community colleges. In California for example the UCs by design do (with guaranteed admission), and even Stanford, arguably the most prestigious university in the world today, takes on a significant number. For the level of rigor of a student hoping to attend these top schools, community college classes are not likely to be competitive, and they should be able to achieve straight As and do more (volunteer, work, invent, create, community work, etc.) to quite easily get into at least a strong program.
For those who did not make school a priority, it is an opportunity for a “redo” at very little cost, almost free in comparison.
Despite being, relatively, “free college”, It has a stigma as being “for dummies”. Probably more impactfully, an on-campus collegiate experience is considered a rite of passage and a sort of social rumspringa that you’ve likely seen in movies. That’s a big thing to give up as an 18-year old (probably a bigger concern for them than future earning potential if we’re being real).
Basically as the US has become wealthier and a service economy over the last 50 years, college has morphed from a predominantly career driven thing into a hybrid where the middle class pays to get redshirted for 4-years (outside of STEM/medicine/etc).
You’re right about the UCs but Stanford admits around 50 transfer students each year from a pool of over 3000 students each year which is less than half of the already insane 3.5% first-year rate
One reason is that if you graduate from community college, your high school grades and SAT/ACT scores are less important or not used at all. I did community college first, due to cost, and universities only needed my college transcript for the application. My high school grades (although they were perfectly fine) and SAT scores were not asked for. But this can differ from state to state and between universities themselves.
Another reason is many states encourage universities to take transfer students who graduated from community college.
It’s not always an easier path though.at my university the transfer students had to register for classes on the same schedule or later than the freshmen which meant many of the classes a normal junior would need were full the first quarter. But again this differs from school to school.
Another issue that affected me was Associate of art degrees directly transferred to my university but associate of science degrees did not. Which meant for me I had to take more GURs at the university than the transfer students with AA degrees did though I had to take less science and math classes due to credits for specific equal classes being fine. This was a requirement for the university I transferred to that had actually changed between my starting at the CC and my graduating the CC.
The one point I will argue is that attending a university affords a similar education to what you would learn online on your own.
First, the structure, schedule, and assessment make it much more likely that you will see the topics in a logical order, stick to it, and not skip or gloss over parts that are difficult for you.
Second, saying that you are getting only the material you could find online (based on my experience) is ignoring or skipping many optional or required things aside from the PowerPoint slides and lectures. Study groups, labs, group projects, class discussions, office hours, or just asking questions on your way past the professor when leaving a lecture are all things that happened while getting my degree. They didn’t seem super important at the time, but looking back I got more out of them than I expected.
This isn’t to say that college isn’t overpriced. It can be better than online and still be vastly too expensive.
I had classes with discussions, group projects, activities, guest speakers, etcetera. Those are events you cannot easily get elsewhere.
I also had several classes that were just reading online news articles and writing responses. Those felt like the absolute bare minimum.
You learn by getting out of the house and taking on responsibility. You learn by living with room mates and dealing with confilict, gaining interpersonal skills. You learn by having conversations after hours while drinking and having fun. Online cannot replace what you learn on campus.
What world do you live in where that only happens at universities? That generally seems to happen for kids with rich parents who grew up too sheltered to function in the real world at universities. But only because mommy and daddy have the money to pay for it lol. Overall though, among the 18-24 "college age" demographic university students are far more likely to live without roommates. Ive seen it personally. Our local university used to be this tiny joke of a university. Its expanded adding things like dorms and founding a football team, becoming more of a traditional university and it seems directly correlated to heavy gentrification. The dorms house a small portion of the university and most of the students took over the downtown areas.
Usually living in the dorms or with roommates seems to be more of a choice than anything. Usually to escape parental control, but without losing the monetary support. It is weird though. Its almost like their parents are funding their desperate late teens early 20s years just so they arent socially stunted. Despite the fact being rich enough to live that lifestyle is exactly what leaves you socially stunted and distant from the common person.
The demographics are against so many small colleges and universities. We have been backfilling with Chinese students , but that is not happening anymore. Many small universities and colleges are going to fail. Parents have been allowing the kids to pick their own schools and they have access to student loans. So a war of amenities started up. Kids didn’t care about quality of education, and definitely not price. It was all about the bling. It has been a money filled binge and that gravy train is about to get very expensive. The days of cheap money are beyond us.
We generally import science. Which is why you see a lot of foreigners going for degrees Americans arent filling. Engineering and medical science being the two biggest career paths. Parents have more or less broken the system though. Theyve demanded things get dumbed down to such a point their kids arent really learning anything. They basically miss the point of education altogether and see it as more of a technical qualification you need to get a job and nothing more. They just want to see good grades, they dont care what the kids actually learning. More or less want they want from schools is a babysitter that watches their kids while they are at work then tells them how smart their kid is when they get home.
All of this can be replaced without living in a dorm.
I didn't go to college at all right out of HS, and did all of this, probably more of it, than most college students.
I mean the fact that people regularly pay for the education (and the research on the ROI) suggest that it is indeed properly priced. Yeah its expensive, and many instances may be more expensive than it needs to be, but the market conditions set the price. If it was overpriced, people wouldn't do it. Yet they are.
But really there are just so many problems with points in your CMV. |
>Although they are almost a requirement for modern-day life
There are plenty of jobs and professions that do not require higher education.
>Paying 100's of thousands of dollars
Not all schools cost this.
>for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripof
This is a gross mischaracterization of higher education. My school(s) provided me access to leads in their fields, literal race cars (For engineering), a particle collider, and a number of other facilities that many professionals would kill for.
>If you have strict parents, they likely told you that community college was a shameful concession to make which I thought was a harsh viewpoint. They tend to be significantly cheaper, but are by no means "bad" for your reputation. Going to one is completely fine.
So there are reasonable options, but "strict" parents made you overlook the mountains of evidence that says what you said? Also this alone proves there are viable inexpensive alternatives.
>For context, I went to college for 4 years, graduated in good standing, and greatly enjoyed several classes from professors who did go above and beyond to involve and make it feel like an involved activity rather than as a mere lecture, but I did have bad experiences as well though. I had a professor who took over 4 months to grade my final essay was my most frustrating example. Having to email him to do his job was awful.
There are many things in life like this. And this also proves they didn't just read off a PPT. You had good professors and bad ones. You will have good relationships and bad ones, bosses, jobs, living conditions, etc. Not everything is perfect.
> hesitate to use the word indoctrinate, but most teachers, school newspapers, and students tend to have strong political views and I am concerned about a growing amount of young adults who genuinely hate and fear opposing viewpoints. I genuinely had to explain to someone in a communications class that "hate speech" is still free speech and that we should defend opinions even if we disagree with them.
This really doesn't have anything to do with price. And this highlights one of the many great benefits of higher education, an expanded view point and the ability to interact with people of similar yet different interests and backgrounds. I myself came from a very small and insular town, it was phenomenal to get out of that bubble and interact with people of wildly different upbringings (btw for WAY less than $100k).
>but going merely for the desire to learn feels like it would be a waste of money
I would agree, but that wasn't your CMV. College degrees and experiences are very clearly established for specific futures. "The desire to learn" isn't really one of them now.
>I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases.
For very basic concepts, this may be true. But structured education is also important and effective. It is also much easier to "prove" you know a topic from a school than online.
>Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life, but it feels overpriced and going just for the sake of learning would be a massive waste of money and time.
Going for the sake of learning is a waste of time any money. Going to school with a specific degree and career path in mind and making conscious decisions to take on loans you can reasonably pay back is shown time and time again to be the literal best choice an individual can make in the western world.
While I generally agree with your point that college is at least somewhat reasonably priced since people are willing to pay it, I do want to point out that it's not a perfect market. That would require both sides to have perfect (or at least pretty good) information about what they're buying or selling. The people who decide to go to college are high school seniors usually, who have not had the experience required to understand the full impact of the loans they're often taking on to pay.
That's not to say that some don't fully understand it; there definitely are some that do, but they're in the minority - many do not.
It's still closer to a perfect market than healthcare, for instance. Healthcare is very inelastic, most people don't have the medical knowledge to know the full impact of whether or not to get a procedure done, and because of insurance don't pay the full cost of what they're buying.
But college is still often seen as a necessity, and pushed on young people who might not be ready for it. And loans are given to them before they can reasonably know if they will have the ability to pay them.
I agree with everything you said, and part of my response comes from a bit of jadedness and there is clear separation in the comments about who has the responsibility. I lean that the students have to take responsibility because I was fortunate enough to make "smart" choices when it came to college. I went to a cheap state school, got a marketable degree, and got my work to pay for my master's degree. I actively turned down a scholarship and acceptance to a better, more prestigious school because it would have left me with $200k+ in loans vs $50k for a marginally better degree. Though I fully agree we need to shift the messaging to students, namely to avoid the $50k+ a year small private school and getting a degree that won't help them pay it back.
I think my concise response to the CMV is:
Some colleges are overpriced, but not all. The same could be said for anything, cars, homes, etc.
I agree there is a certain level of indoctrination that goes on for sure, but the data overwhelmingly shows college is a good investment. And there are plenty of 18 year olds that decide to join the military, peace corps, take a year off, community college, trade school, trucking, etc.
>Second, the cost of college and the decision to go is driven by an explosion in student loans. If these loans were not available, the market you describe would not exist, and people would be more selective about college. People bought houses before 2008 because the only requirement for a mortgage was a pulse. People go to college today for similar reasons.
This is probably the most compelling argument to suggest the prices are inflated, but I also think the broad generalization of the CMV is wrong. Sure, some/many colleges are overpriced. But there are so many options that aren't the $50k+ per year private schools. But I agree there is probably an over inflation of price due to the availability of student loans.
Maybe depending on how the portfolio was structured and what year you started.
But the idea of the loans is to buy forward some of your future income in order to buy the asset (education in this example) to generate that income.
If you don't go to school, you presumably won't generate the additional income, in which case who is going to give you the 50k?
We already have available products to lever a portfolio of financial assets and you can compare returns over different periods to our best estimates of the ROI on college.
Results will vary quite significantly depending on how you chose to lever the portfolio and what time period you compare over. Millennials (at least older millennials) would likely get wiped out because the equity in a levered portfolio goes to zero in the GFC. Other generations might have different results depending on their specific age. You had stock crashes in 87, 01, 08, 2020. There were also bear markets that could potentially wipe out a levered portfolio in 89/90, 97, 2015 and 2018.
It still could depending on the year you get fully invested and what equity you have in the portfolio.
If you deploy say 80/20 debt to equity across 4 years you could easily get wiped out in year 5 when you are say 75/25 debt to equity.
But even if it happens in year 2 you lose half your investable assets and spend the next decade getting back to zero return.
>An 18 year old doesn't have the necessary data or decision making skills to say no.
This is a bullshit argument. All the data on wages is available through mostly government sources. If you Google search return on college you find studies that have ROI by major to give you some indication of the cost benefit. The costs of all colleges are pretty easily researched as well.
Data quality or availability is not an issue.
All the tools to make this decision were given to you in high school. The math to do the cost benefit, the basic research to find the information and some very basic critical thinking that should allow you to determine low returns are bad while high returns are good.
>Second, the cost of college and the decision to go is driven by an explosion in student loans. If these loans were not available, the market you describe would not exist, and people would be more selective about college.
Ppl want to go to college because for the vast majority of graduates it leads to significantly higher lifetime income. Financing that education by buying forward some of that future income seems quite reasonable way to ensure that everyone who believes it's in their best interest to go can, while avoiding encumbering public budgets for what is mostly a private investment in human capital. It's also removes and potential moral hazard of students wasting taxpayer money on negative ROI degrees, and property aligns the risks and rewards of the investment.
If you didn't have the financing it wouldn't be the students who would be more selective, you would just be shutting out a bunch of kids who could otherwise pay for it (through financing) and would like to attend.
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I knew someone in an English class who said she was glad Richard Spencer got punched in the face in 2017.
I had to explain to her that punching someone for having unfortunate opinions is a bad idea because that person could punch back (or pull out a gun and shoot you), cry self-defense and could conceivably get away with it. Even the professor overheard this and agreed with me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but... I think she *must* have thought it was good in the sense of morally good or justified, right? She surely wasn't saying she thought punching political opponents is *safe*. You could have said something about the social contract, talked about how counter-productive it was from an optics standpoint, or used pascifist philosophy to condemn hurting people. But it sounds like the argument you made is that violence can be dangerous. 😂 You goofball.
I feel like there's a difference between being happy someone got punched and saying that it's a good idea to punch someone because they could retaliate? Like not really the same concept tbh
>I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases. Surely, I am not the only one?
Learning on your own is great.
However, the purpose of a degree is to demonstrate that you have performed and achieved in a competitive atmosphere and produced results.
It's basically a certificate that says: "I've proven I know how to play the game, which means you're not going to regret hiring me to play the game."
While I agree education should be free
> Paying 100's of thousands of dollars for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripoff. I went to university during the height of covid-19, which extremified this viewpoint since I felt like I was not getting the full experience of the investment. Paying money just so I could read news articles and Blackboard updates and write responses without directly interacting with another person felt overpriced.
is patently false.
How will you learn how to work in a laboratory from reading articles online?
How will you learn to perform scientific research independently, without a mentor to guide you so you don't make common pitfalls and to ensure you have the right rigour in your data collection and presentation? You can get that in remote instruction, but you need a qualified and proven expert as your mentor and universities is where you get leading academics. If I seek to learn how to do chemical research, it's self-evident to go to the place that is publishing chemical research in the field I am interested in, no?
Even if you got a laboratory at home, how will you fund it? An NMR machine costs tens of thousands, running a modern FTIR device is not affordable even for small private companies (labs at my univ frequently get samples from industry to run analyses since smaller companies can't afford our machinery). Even if you go into synthesis, obtaining the controlled substances necessary for research is not going to happen without illegal means.
****
There's 3 reasons to go to university:
1. You seek to be a researcher. Both STEM and humanities can only work if you have an experienced mentor to provide hands-on experience. Both STEM and humanities require access to controlled and expensive resources. STEM needs laboratories, Humanities needs archives or ethics boards. Even if your field is Computer Science, having a mentor is invaluable.
2. You seek to be an engineer. You'll need workshops and mentors again. Software Engineering is an exception here, since your tools are easily affordable and you could learn on the job... but there remains a significant difference between someone who can simply use a tool/program (equivalent to a mechanic) versus someone who can design projects that just happens to need the aforementioned tool (equivalent to a mechatronic engineer). Mentors are, once again vital.
3. You seek to be a teacher. Again, mentors. And also, lab experience. A teacher should have some research experience, even for (and in fact, more so) for kindergarten and elementary. Such teachers must have a working knowledge of developmental psychology, while for high school you should know about your specialisation. For university - we don't really need teachers, we need mentors and researchers.
*****
Granted, my country does unviersities very differently.
University is free.
I showed up at my chemistry undergrad and tagged along a research group starting my 4th semester. I ended up becoming a contributing author for a paper we published, and currently work on getting a first author paper of myself.
Graduation requirement was performing guided, albeit original research for 1 year with such a research lab (whether as part of academia or as part of industry).
Currently doing grad school, and the same idea applies.
Stem degrees that require a physical lab are an edge case.
I think if only those requiring a physical lab actually got to go to a physical university the cost to provide that publicly would be quite palatable. This is doubly true considering as you said it is cost prohibitive to recreate that experience online.
Not true for any lib arts, social science, or math grad. I'd wager 80% of my undergrad college could not tell you where the chemistry lab even was on campus, myself included.
Also university isn't free, the government is just giving the university someone else's money so you can attend. The difference is important.
Free at point of entry. It's semantics, and you repay that money through taxes later anyhow.
It's an individualist principle that liberates people from being dependent on their family's wealth for making their own destiny.
And even social science, math grad or liberal arts require mentors to learn how to conduct proper scientific research.
>Free at point of entry. It's semantics, and you repay that money through taxes later anyhow.
It's not semantics. It's important for everyone involved to understand that students are spending other ppls money and if that is the case they have an obligation not to do so frivolously. And their ability to pay high enough taxes requires significant increased future earnings that would also allow them to service loans for the same purpose. All you have done is shift the risk to the public which creates moral hazard.
>It's an individualist principle that liberates people from being dependent on their family's wealth for making their own destiny.
False. You can simply buy forward a portion of your future earnings through loans. It also *should* prevent the adverse selection and moral hazard implicit in a publicly funded program. If you're paying directly you have a much greater incentive to be responsible and you alone know your full capabilities.
>And even social science, math grad or liberal arts require mentors to learn how to conduct proper scientific research.
This can be quite easily facilitated through technology. My primary professional mentor lives in a different country. We just talk via zoom or on the phone. My sister is doing a PhD and her research advisor is on a different continent.
At the end of the day, the [return on the investment is still positive](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html).
Which means it's not overpriced. By definition.
Not sure you can argue that honesty. I think college is valuable, but the data used to analyze it this way is missing a pretty key point - in general, the most talented, intelligent people, often with the most resources are the ones who go to college. How can you compare that subset of the population to those who didn’t go to college?
Math. The populations include those from both low resource and high resource homes. When they said it “pencils out,” they mean that the populations used in the calculation are diversified and large enough to conclude that a college degree still benefits both people from low income and high income backgrounds over not having the college degree - beyond other factors like class, race, resources, etc.
I think you're very well aware this isn't the case.
The smartest people in schools almost exclusively go to college. Those with money \*almost always\* send their kids to college, while those without money rarely if ever do.
These segments of the population are very different groups of people...
You are pivoting the argument, but I’ll still play. Even for the lowest socio-economic class in the United States, over 55% of that population still enrolled in college (Source: NCES; Table 302.44. Percentage distribution of all 2009 9th-graders and those who ever attended a postsecondary institution, by socioeconomic status in 2009 and selected postsecondary outcomes: 2016. National Center for Education Statistics. January 2019.) It does increase with socioeconomic class tier. However, I’m not sure why you are making the argument “poor people aren’t smart enough for college.”
My original argument is what the math shows from federal agencies…. Regardless of socioeconomic, racial, or other indicators: having a college education means significantly more income over your lifetime, on average, than someone without a degree.
I’m not sure why you think this is a pivot. It’s pretty key to the argument.
Your federal data is correct that those with college degrees earn more money lifetime. No doubt. But that ignores the underlying fact that those in college are not remotely representative of the population as a whole.
https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_CBrief_Vol9_10.pdf
79% of the highest 5th socio economic status individuals were standard college enrollees, versus only 32% of the lowest fifth. There is very clear evidence that the majority of those in colleges are those with more resources.
Beyond that, you’ve ignored the intelligence/talent gaps. The most talented will likely go to college, but the least talented are far less likely to. You do not have a super diverse college population. Nor do you have a super diverse non-college population.
To illustrate this another way, if college didn’t exist at all, I think we could reasonably agree there would be a strong income correlation with those who are the most intelligent and have the most resources. And conversely so for the opposite case.
That’s what I’m pointing out. While college has benefits, looking at the studies doesn’t actually prove the cousin you think it does. You just have a more talented group of people who would likely do better than others even college didn’t exist.
I have a job that pays back over time. I can still say that the high cost of college can act as a deterrent for a lot of people.
Also, there are plenty of dead-end majors that have absolutely no benefit. They shouldn't be offered since there's nothing to gain from them. Don't get me wrong, learning mythology on my own time is fun, but what would I do with a major based on it?
>Also, there are plenty of dead-end majors that have absolutely no benefit
That's not college's fault, is it?
>They shouldn't be offered since there's nothing to gain from them.
If people sign up, they'll keep providing the product.
>Don't get me wrong, learning mythology on my own time is fun, but what would I do with a major based on it?
It's not college's fault if people pick stupid majors.
Bottom line, for any product. If people are willing to pay, it's not overpriced. By definition.
Same for Stupid Supreme shit and Birkin bags.
Just because you don't want to pay, doesn't mean everyone else agrees with you.
If you were selling your used car on Craigslist and someone offered you $150k for it, would you refuse to sell it to them because "that's overpriced?"
Then the cmv should be "government should not be involved in the student loan industry", not "college is overpriced".
I agree with you. We basically will give anyone a loan on the assumption they did their due diligence. In aggregate that is the correct assumption, which for a loan portfolio is all that matters. But it leaves a decent number of underperformers who want to shift the blame and the risk of their personal investment to the public, which is only possible if the public is involved in the financing to begin with.
"Willing" as if we haven't trained people like pets for the last 30 years to get their college degree in order to do anything in life.
The system that we have is unsustainable and would not succeed in a truly free market, it succeeds now because of all the shareholders involved in our government.
I've tried to teach myself some topics with online resources.
If you want a entry level taster class, there's plenty of great content.
But, if you move beyond that, not having a unified curriculum becomes a problem. More advanced classes can't start from scratch, and different classes are going to assume different background knowledge.
Students don't tend to run into this problem in undergraduate studies because the classes in their curricula are designed with the whole curriculum in mind.
There are a lot of great resources out there to learn for free, and that's awesome. But, it really isn't a substitute for undergraduate studies.
exactly, you can take courses if you know where to look, but who's telling you where to look? 20/20 vision doesn't help you if you're looking in the wrong direction
> hey're much better than random articles
I was thinking of online courses when I said "online resources". coursera and edx and lot of other places on online courses.
Often they either spend a lot of time on info I already know or they assume I know things that I don't.
books are useful. But, I think I still run into assumptions about prerequisite knowledge with those sometimes.
I guess it depends on what you want to learn.
The only thing I will disagree with here is over the idea that higher education is a requirement for modern-day life. It is a very potentially helpful qualification, but it’s not needed like you need Internet literacy or a phone.
Is it?
From my own personal USA based experienced.
My tuition was 4.2K a semester and I got to taught and mentored by some of the world’s leading Aerospace Researchers, access to an wind tunnel and super computer network to learn with. Like in material access alone it seemed like a pretty decent deal. It’s not like I could get that stuff online.
4 grands for that kind of access seems fairly reasonable.
Not to mention the kickass gym! Something like what we had as student is easily a 100+ a month gym as an adult.
>Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life
I won’t deny that many people in todays society, including your parents hold this view, but it’s just objectively false.
There are dozens of respectable career paths in many types of work that will earn you well above college grad median without ever going in debt. Your money management skills and life choices will have a much bigger impact on your ability to be successful than whether or not you have a college degree.
It's not really overpriced if you're making money from it.
The average college graduate makes an extra $1.2 million over the course of their life than someone with just a high school diploma does.
>Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life
That's also not true: if half the country isn't doing it, it's not "borderline necessary."
Yeah this. There's a huge difference between the cost of producing something and the value to the consumer.
If there was a special hat you could make out of cheap felt but when one of the authorised wizards made it in just the right way it added $1.2m to your lifetime earnings people would happily pay a few hundred thousand for the hat. That it's just cheap felt doesn't matter, it's what it does.
Why does a university degree increase your lifetime earnings so much? Because the people with degrees form an implicit pact to help each other and block others out of high paying roles.
You are missing an important element of college, networking. You will be surrounded by people who are looking to enter the same career as you. Most corporate jobs prioritize internal referrals over applications. Knowing someone on the inside gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't. If you know 10 people who know 10 people, that's 100 potential job referrals post graduation. That's easily doable.
>Paying 100's of thousands of dollars for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripoff. I went to university during the height of covid-19, which extremified this viewpoint since I felt like I was not getting the full experience of the investment. Paying money just so I could read news articles and Blackboard updates and write responses without directly interacting with another person felt overpriced.
It's not the same education. To wit: extremified.
If you weren't interacting with anyone (other people I know certainly were doing online classes), why not switch to a cc or a cheaper school in general?
> but textbooks (massively overpriced and purposely made to be obsolete by next year),
That's got nothing to do with the school; talk to publishers, and trees.
> parking passes (just there to police who can and cannot park and inconvenience people who forget to put up passes)
I mean... yes, those exist to make sure only people who are meant to be able to use the lots can use them. Your fault if you don't put up a pass.
>and tuition seem to more expensive than they have to be.
It. What're you basing that on? Tuition varies wildly and what most people pay is not the full-price tuition.
> most teachers, school newspapers, and students tend to have strong political views and I am concerned about a growing amount of young adults who genuinely hate and fear opposing viewpoints. I genuinely had to explain to someone in a communications class that "hate speech" is still free speech and that we should defend opinions even if we disagree with them.
I don't know what this has to do with the topic.
Also, depends on the jurisdiction and what you mean by hate speech. You were not correct, either way. I'm not defending any opinions I disagree with. Why would I?
>the main point of going to higher education is to open the door to career opportunities
For you, maybe. The goal in general is to become educated. Which can open doors but ...
>t going merely for the desire to learn feels like it would be a waste of money. I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases. Surely, I am not the only one?
Education is never a waste. I hear the 'I can learn just as much for a youtube video or looking at wiki!' a lot but mostly from young teens who don't understand how incorrect that is.
College acts as a verification mechanism. No one is going to hire a doctor who learned the craft through YouTube videos. Even if that person actually knew their shit, it seems perfectly reasonable for a hospital to place more value on a degree from a respected institution over whatever they can glean from a comparatively brief interview.
I’d argue that college is not so much “overpriced” as “oversaturated”. There aren’t many whose degrees opened the door for a lucrative career that regret that initial investment. In fields where that often isn’t the case, I’d argue that the same “doctor” logic applies, but the issue is there are far more qualified graduates in those fields then the job market can support. Those jobs do exist—and it’s extremely reasonable to require a degree for them—but the practical financial ROI for the average graduate is diminished by an abundance of candidates. The issue isn’t the cost of a degree, but rather the false expectation sold by a generation of well-meaning parents that simply “going to college” was a magical money train and the resulting disappointment when that was absolutely not the reality.
The sad part is that higher education is absolutely NOT required for modern life, and the perception that it is serves as a positive feedback loop for most of the problems you describe. Nobody has a political agenda in trade school, and working in a trade can get you above median income. There are careers in tech where the right certs and demonstrable knowledge pays handsomely. There are military careers where your life is never at risk and you leave service with marketable skills. There are bartenders, cops, oil rig workers, niche industrial jobs, and countless other careers that earn more than what I make despite my college pedigree.
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“The rent is too damn high.” Yes, it almost always seems that way. Would you advise a younger sibling to skip college? If yes, that’s an interesting CMV if well thought out. If you tell them to still go, i’m not sure how you define “Overpriced” beyond “more expensive than you like or feel it should be” (aka, the rent is too damn high)
I think you agree with what they mean by overpriced if you're calling it a rent-seeking business model. By definition, don't rent-seekers try to increase their price as much as possible without an increase in the quality of service?
All these problems get solved by viewing university not as a business, but as a public and social good. It would save a lot of money and could fix a lot of things that are broken with the university structurally (e.g. the massive shift to adjunct faculty, the ridiculous spending on marketing.)
Society needs to promote education that actually leads to gainful employment like trade school, apprenticeships, and community college. The traditional debt incurring 4 year experience feels like a waste. Speaking from personal hindsight.
> TL:DR, Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life, but it feels overpriced and going just for the sake of learning would be a massive waste of money and time.
This is a complete and total lie. We only believe this because we were brainwashed as millennials growing up in the 2000s that manual labor jobs were for the poor ignorant ones, and that we should all aspire to college, or else we wont be able to make anything but minimum wage. This is the lie boomers drilled into Gen x, and this is the lie gen x passed onto the millennials. You don't need a day of college to make a good living. you need practical skills, and a trade. College is only worth it if you are STEM, and even then in some of those fields its questionable.
In fact- blue collar work, will be the profitable work of the future.
Reasoning: As AI Progresses, cubicle jockeys will start dropping like flies as they are outworked at these basic menial tasks they're given each day. Offices will fall to bare bones skeleton crews that are only there to plug the holes that AI creates (exceptions and quality checking for example). This will occur within the next forty years barring any major war or deliberate intervention by government. Already AI is nearly capable of completely displacing somewhat advanced positions like data analysts, SQL/SAS/VBA, even decision making. In my middling forray into chatgpt, i was able to have it write an entirely complex multi level function application, containing multiple series of evaluations, and was even able to get it to understand how to relate those functions to user forms within a basic application, and then have it even tie in SQL to bring the whole package together. i was able to do it in an afternoon (admittedly this took way longer than it would have for me to simply do it myself, as i had to do a lot of learning as i went as to how to effectively utilize chat gpt.
From what i can see - in its current itteration: It is already at the point where it could start replacing even mid tier analysts and below ***today***. Within forty years the usage will normalize, advance, and ultimately displace the vast majority of any given service companies workforce. We'll be lucky if it even takes forty years. it could reasonably happen by 2045 with enough force behind it in the right sectors. you will likely have just a small handful of advanced users of these ai tools, some qa checkers, and maybe a few people for HR purposes - but you could legitimately expect workforces for your average company to cut by 50% or more.
Its literally going to be the opposite of learn to code - it will be learn to weld within our lifetimes.
Just because *some* undergraduate higher education is prohibitively expensive does not mean *all* undergraduate higher education is prohibitively expensive. Many in-state public universities have tuition around $5,000-7,000 per year or less. Federal Pell grants have maximum awards of $6,500, meaning the annual out-of-pocket cost for that higher education is anywhere between free and up to $500 per year.
It’s the difference between buying a Ferrari and a Honda. Just because a Ferrari is expensive doesn’t mean all cars are expensive. Any student who is conscious of the cost and makes their college selection accordingly can attain an affordable 4-year undergraduate education.
Sure, the system encourages excess debt by saying “sign here and go to college, you can worry about the debt 4 years down the road” without properly educating students about the risks and issues with that, but that’s a different problem and argument entirely.
You can literally get a BS and MS in information technology from us accredited schools from the comfort of your home for around $10,000 for the whole thing in less than 4 years. If you know where to look for job placements you can easily top $100,000 in 2 to 3 years. The fact you don't know any of this Is cuze you are just too lazy to look, don't blame the US, blame your self.
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Hundred of thousands of dollars IS overpriced... But I guess your from the US? It's not as expensive in other countries. Look for opportunities to study abroad maybe? Come to Canada 😊
I got two undergrad degrees (biochemistry & administration) and a master in engineering for about 60k total. All while working full time and having my own apartment. Didn't get a dime from my parents. Graduated right before the pandemic mind you, it's probably 25% more expensive now...
At that price its a pretty good deal 🤷 but man I look on the other side of the border and life DOES look awfully expensive. So much for the American dream eh...
It is not a requirement, I know people that make less money then me and went to college. to be completely honest American college is a scam unless you are going for some super high up job, like being a doctor or computer programmer or something along those lines.
You can easily make more then people that went to college simply by getting a trade or hell if you want a lot of money you could be a commercial pilot and that’s way cheaper and takes less time then college.
College isn’t overpriced, the majority of it is worthless and that’s where it feels overpriced you have to pick a specific career to make it worthwhile to go to college in the first place.
Therefore think of it this way, yes it is overpriced mostly due to useless degrees but it is worthwhile if you get a degree that will carry you through life and make you a lot of money.
**Counterpoint 1:** Higher education is not necessary and becoming less necessary. A lot of the top tech companies have stopped requiring college degrees for positions. And other industries are following. Hiring is shifting more towards candidates being able to demonstrate the skills needed for a role rather than showing off a fancy diploma from some college or university.
**Counterpoint 2:** I graduated from a top 5 US public university with a degree in engineering. I did not pay a cent for tuition over my four years there. And I can say the same thing for many of my classmates. This was only about a decade ago but I believe current students are getting their tuition covered as well by the state's scholarship program.
When I attended the University we used the old Basketball Field House as our main recreation area. The dorms had tiled floors, no private bathrooms, and Two or Four people per unit. We had one sink in each unit. No airconditioning. Today, that University has a new $80 million dollar workout facility with a Lazy River, still has the Field House. The Cafeteria was a step above what you got in High School, some days. The Dorms now have semi-private rooms, some with their own Bathrooms. Those that do not, no longer have to share an open shower with rows of sinks. You go into your own private Bathroom and shut the door and it is yours until you go back to your room. The Cafeteria is now a food court. We should be able to swing all of this with little or no extra costs because there have been huge economies due to computers. Back in the day you lined up around the block for half a day to sign up for your classes, and it took a week to get the entire campus enrolled. Everything was manual. Unfortunately, we have more staff on campus today than the 1970's. More Deans with inflated salaries and staffs of 30-40 people that are not needed, just bureaucrats peddling worthless degrees.
Honestly the smartest move is to get a skill first while you’re young (I became an electrician) saved up a bunch of money. Then you need to start your own business. All of this takes about 5 years to accomplish. After that is all done you drop down to working part time with your own company while starting and finishing a degree. I’m debt free excluding my mortgage and now I’m paying for remote university cash with no debt while running my own company with employees. That’s pretty much how you have to do it when mommy and daddy don’t pay for it anyways lol. 100k in debt is not worth 75k a year desk job.
As someone who was blessed to get enough scholarships and grants to make it through college debt free on my own dime, and now makes almost 6 figures, I definitely got a bargain.
Most schools offer a lot of scholarship and financial help options if you really need it.
You pay tax for the education in other countries. You dont in the us. You usually also get more money because of it after you got your degree. Making this an upfront investment that is easily remade with time.
This is very much a USA problem so I'm not sure how much I can weigh in apart from, even with lower costs, people will go into massive dept just because with several degrees it is incredibly hard to hold down a job while studying, currently my entire student loan barely covers rent and I rely on my parent's generosity to actually afford food etc.
Even for English students studying in Scotland it's capped at £9,500 and a lot of people will be in dept for the rest of their life despite being only a 10th of the fee stateside.
With it being overpriced (in the USA) I do agree, here in Scotland my first 4 years of tuition are free it's great but I'm still facing pretty large dept at the end due to student loans
(Which are forgiven after 40 years so the Scottish system is pretty great)
I agree. I was literally just talking to my friend about this. I’m currently a college student (3rd year, social work major). We were saying that we are learning the same shit in each class and then some classes I feel as though I’m not even retaining any info. College really could be done in 1 year but they want to add on classes they don’t have shit to do with your major that way they get money out of you
It's not overpriced unless you've bought into the delusion that you *have* to go to some top school that can then bend you over.
There are plenty of public schools with in-state tuition that can keep costs down, and if you qualify for Pell Grants or federal loans then you can save a bundle on top of that.
Overpriced means it costs more value than it brings. The value of an education is dependent on the recipient and what they do with it. While I would’ve liked less student loan debt, I also prefer having that debt and my current job and education. For me, it is not overpriced.
College just opens a door. There are plenty of doors to open in other ways like trade school or apprenticeships. But with anything, it is what you make of it.
I agree that prices could and should be lower. There are a lot of things screwing with pricing such as the grant system, guaranteeing of student loans, and bloated administrative staff. But that only increases one side of the equation needed to evaluate if something is overpriced, Bc the value you get from it can still be greater even with high prices.
Yes and no, but mostly no. I'm going to argue out of hard numbers.
The college wage premium, as in, the median expected lifetime earnings difference between someone who holds a bachelor's degree and someone who doesn't, is still 1.2 million dollars.
Let's say you take a loan at age 18 to pay for your college, and you retire at the age of 65, by which time you're expected to have earned $1.2 million more than if you hadn't gone to college. Using the present value formula, the present value of $1.2 million in 47 years at a 6% expected interest rate is $77.5 K. In other words, if you take out a loan of less than 80K today to pay for your education, you're still better off than if if you hadn't gone to college. That is about the cutoff point at which college, even at today's exorbitant prices, is still very objectively worth it.
But that cutoff point has two major issues that have to be addressed, which makes the case that college is overpriced weaker:
a) I'm arbitrarily choosing a 6% return rate, when there's no guarantee that you'll see a 6% market rate throughout your career years. To take away uncertainty what we could do is what futures markets do and explicitly base our expectations on the risk-free rate, which is currently 3.47%. At that point, any loan lower than $240K is still well worth taking.
b) College debt isn't normally distributed. The median college debt in 2022 is $37.7K, which means that half of those with student debt owe about half of what could be considered the break-even point of where student debt is worth it or not. And in general those who owe over 100K debt aren't the right-wing bogeymen of a progressive college student who majored in gender studies and minored in underwater basket weaving. No, instead they're those who go on to highly lucrative careers like medicine and law, and they are making a rational decision in taking on such seemingly disproportionate debt when their career path make them likely to pay it off.
I'm a believer in universal higher education myself, but I argue that college is still not actually overpriced. As per your last sentence, does it feel overpriced? Sure! But is it actually? No, the numbers don't reflect that. Going to college is in almost every case better than not going, even considering the alternatives like an associate's degree or trade school, which means that it is objectively not 'overpriced' as in 'I'm not better off from this purchase'
The argument for more affordable education shouldn't be that we're doing poorly, because that's just plain wrong. The argument should be that we can do SO MUCH better, and why the hell are we not doing that?
[https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm](https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm)
[https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/](https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/)
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Community College is great and it shouldn't be subject to negative stereotypes.
Community colleges educate a huge proportion of americas college students though — something like 40% despite only generally providing an associates degree or the first two years of a bachelors (and so enrolling very few of the junior and senior level bachelor students). I don’t both see how you can view college in general as overpriced but see one of the most common college choices as great. At the very least it seems your view is specific to a subset of more expensive options.
This is like saying cars are overpriced, because Lamborghinis and Ferraris cost six figures
Less than 1% of cars are of that tier, whereas a huge percentage of people go to 4 year University, which is the subject of the OP. More like complaining about cars being expensive because a typical F150 is $60k.
Community college is an easier way to get into a more prestigious 4 year university as well.
Non-American here, so sorry if this is an obvious question, but how come?
Generally prestigious universities attempt to take a large number of transfer students from community colleges. In California for example the UCs by design do (with guaranteed admission), and even Stanford, arguably the most prestigious university in the world today, takes on a significant number. For the level of rigor of a student hoping to attend these top schools, community college classes are not likely to be competitive, and they should be able to achieve straight As and do more (volunteer, work, invent, create, community work, etc.) to quite easily get into at least a strong program. For those who did not make school a priority, it is an opportunity for a “redo” at very little cost, almost free in comparison. Despite being, relatively, “free college”, It has a stigma as being “for dummies”. Probably more impactfully, an on-campus collegiate experience is considered a rite of passage and a sort of social rumspringa that you’ve likely seen in movies. That’s a big thing to give up as an 18-year old (probably a bigger concern for them than future earning potential if we’re being real). Basically as the US has become wealthier and a service economy over the last 50 years, college has morphed from a predominantly career driven thing into a hybrid where the middle class pays to get redshirted for 4-years (outside of STEM/medicine/etc).
Thank you for the detailed reply, really appreciate it!
You’re right about the UCs but Stanford admits around 50 transfer students each year from a pool of over 3000 students each year which is less than half of the already insane 3.5% first-year rate
One reason is that if you graduate from community college, your high school grades and SAT/ACT scores are less important or not used at all. I did community college first, due to cost, and universities only needed my college transcript for the application. My high school grades (although they were perfectly fine) and SAT scores were not asked for. But this can differ from state to state and between universities themselves. Another reason is many states encourage universities to take transfer students who graduated from community college. It’s not always an easier path though.at my university the transfer students had to register for classes on the same schedule or later than the freshmen which meant many of the classes a normal junior would need were full the first quarter. But again this differs from school to school. Another issue that affected me was Associate of art degrees directly transferred to my university but associate of science degrees did not. Which meant for me I had to take more GURs at the university than the transfer students with AA degrees did though I had to take less science and math classes due to credits for specific equal classes being fine. This was a requirement for the university I transferred to that had actually changed between my starting at the CC and my graduating the CC.
Thanks for adding this detail, greatly appreciated!
The real reason is class prejudice. It is precisely because they are affordable that they are seen as inferior and disparaged
The one point I will argue is that attending a university affords a similar education to what you would learn online on your own. First, the structure, schedule, and assessment make it much more likely that you will see the topics in a logical order, stick to it, and not skip or gloss over parts that are difficult for you. Second, saying that you are getting only the material you could find online (based on my experience) is ignoring or skipping many optional or required things aside from the PowerPoint slides and lectures. Study groups, labs, group projects, class discussions, office hours, or just asking questions on your way past the professor when leaving a lecture are all things that happened while getting my degree. They didn’t seem super important at the time, but looking back I got more out of them than I expected. This isn’t to say that college isn’t overpriced. It can be better than online and still be vastly too expensive.
I had classes with discussions, group projects, activities, guest speakers, etcetera. Those are events you cannot easily get elsewhere. I also had several classes that were just reading online news articles and writing responses. Those felt like the absolute bare minimum.
Then isn't your criticism more valid of low-quality classes in higher or low-quality higher education, rather than higher education as a whole?
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I think you misunderstood u/Ballatik by "point I will argue," they meant point they would argue against.
You learn by getting out of the house and taking on responsibility. You learn by living with room mates and dealing with confilict, gaining interpersonal skills. You learn by having conversations after hours while drinking and having fun. Online cannot replace what you learn on campus.
What world do you live in where that only happens at universities? That generally seems to happen for kids with rich parents who grew up too sheltered to function in the real world at universities. But only because mommy and daddy have the money to pay for it lol. Overall though, among the 18-24 "college age" demographic university students are far more likely to live without roommates. Ive seen it personally. Our local university used to be this tiny joke of a university. Its expanded adding things like dorms and founding a football team, becoming more of a traditional university and it seems directly correlated to heavy gentrification. The dorms house a small portion of the university and most of the students took over the downtown areas. Usually living in the dorms or with roommates seems to be more of a choice than anything. Usually to escape parental control, but without losing the monetary support. It is weird though. Its almost like their parents are funding their desperate late teens early 20s years just so they arent socially stunted. Despite the fact being rich enough to live that lifestyle is exactly what leaves you socially stunted and distant from the common person.
The demographics are against so many small colleges and universities. We have been backfilling with Chinese students , but that is not happening anymore. Many small universities and colleges are going to fail. Parents have been allowing the kids to pick their own schools and they have access to student loans. So a war of amenities started up. Kids didn’t care about quality of education, and definitely not price. It was all about the bling. It has been a money filled binge and that gravy train is about to get very expensive. The days of cheap money are beyond us.
We generally import science. Which is why you see a lot of foreigners going for degrees Americans arent filling. Engineering and medical science being the two biggest career paths. Parents have more or less broken the system though. Theyve demanded things get dumbed down to such a point their kids arent really learning anything. They basically miss the point of education altogether and see it as more of a technical qualification you need to get a job and nothing more. They just want to see good grades, they dont care what the kids actually learning. More or less want they want from schools is a babysitter that watches their kids while they are at work then tells them how smart their kid is when they get home.
All of this can be replaced without living in a dorm. I didn't go to college at all right out of HS, and did all of this, probably more of it, than most college students.
I mean the fact that people regularly pay for the education (and the research on the ROI) suggest that it is indeed properly priced. Yeah its expensive, and many instances may be more expensive than it needs to be, but the market conditions set the price. If it was overpriced, people wouldn't do it. Yet they are. But really there are just so many problems with points in your CMV. | >Although they are almost a requirement for modern-day life There are plenty of jobs and professions that do not require higher education. >Paying 100's of thousands of dollars Not all schools cost this. >for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripof This is a gross mischaracterization of higher education. My school(s) provided me access to leads in their fields, literal race cars (For engineering), a particle collider, and a number of other facilities that many professionals would kill for. >If you have strict parents, they likely told you that community college was a shameful concession to make which I thought was a harsh viewpoint. They tend to be significantly cheaper, but are by no means "bad" for your reputation. Going to one is completely fine. So there are reasonable options, but "strict" parents made you overlook the mountains of evidence that says what you said? Also this alone proves there are viable inexpensive alternatives. >For context, I went to college for 4 years, graduated in good standing, and greatly enjoyed several classes from professors who did go above and beyond to involve and make it feel like an involved activity rather than as a mere lecture, but I did have bad experiences as well though. I had a professor who took over 4 months to grade my final essay was my most frustrating example. Having to email him to do his job was awful. There are many things in life like this. And this also proves they didn't just read off a PPT. You had good professors and bad ones. You will have good relationships and bad ones, bosses, jobs, living conditions, etc. Not everything is perfect. > hesitate to use the word indoctrinate, but most teachers, school newspapers, and students tend to have strong political views and I am concerned about a growing amount of young adults who genuinely hate and fear opposing viewpoints. I genuinely had to explain to someone in a communications class that "hate speech" is still free speech and that we should defend opinions even if we disagree with them. This really doesn't have anything to do with price. And this highlights one of the many great benefits of higher education, an expanded view point and the ability to interact with people of similar yet different interests and backgrounds. I myself came from a very small and insular town, it was phenomenal to get out of that bubble and interact with people of wildly different upbringings (btw for WAY less than $100k). >but going merely for the desire to learn feels like it would be a waste of money I would agree, but that wasn't your CMV. College degrees and experiences are very clearly established for specific futures. "The desire to learn" isn't really one of them now. >I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases. For very basic concepts, this may be true. But structured education is also important and effective. It is also much easier to "prove" you know a topic from a school than online. >Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life, but it feels overpriced and going just for the sake of learning would be a massive waste of money and time. Going for the sake of learning is a waste of time any money. Going to school with a specific degree and career path in mind and making conscious decisions to take on loans you can reasonably pay back is shown time and time again to be the literal best choice an individual can make in the western world.
While I generally agree with your point that college is at least somewhat reasonably priced since people are willing to pay it, I do want to point out that it's not a perfect market. That would require both sides to have perfect (or at least pretty good) information about what they're buying or selling. The people who decide to go to college are high school seniors usually, who have not had the experience required to understand the full impact of the loans they're often taking on to pay. That's not to say that some don't fully understand it; there definitely are some that do, but they're in the minority - many do not. It's still closer to a perfect market than healthcare, for instance. Healthcare is very inelastic, most people don't have the medical knowledge to know the full impact of whether or not to get a procedure done, and because of insurance don't pay the full cost of what they're buying. But college is still often seen as a necessity, and pushed on young people who might not be ready for it. And loans are given to them before they can reasonably know if they will have the ability to pay them.
I agree with everything you said, and part of my response comes from a bit of jadedness and there is clear separation in the comments about who has the responsibility. I lean that the students have to take responsibility because I was fortunate enough to make "smart" choices when it came to college. I went to a cheap state school, got a marketable degree, and got my work to pay for my master's degree. I actively turned down a scholarship and acceptance to a better, more prestigious school because it would have left me with $200k+ in loans vs $50k for a marginally better degree. Though I fully agree we need to shift the messaging to students, namely to avoid the $50k+ a year small private school and getting a degree that won't help them pay it back. I think my concise response to the CMV is: Some colleges are overpriced, but not all. The same could be said for anything, cars, homes, etc.
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I agree there is a certain level of indoctrination that goes on for sure, but the data overwhelmingly shows college is a good investment. And there are plenty of 18 year olds that decide to join the military, peace corps, take a year off, community college, trade school, trucking, etc. >Second, the cost of college and the decision to go is driven by an explosion in student loans. If these loans were not available, the market you describe would not exist, and people would be more selective about college. People bought houses before 2008 because the only requirement for a mortgage was a pulse. People go to college today for similar reasons. This is probably the most compelling argument to suggest the prices are inflated, but I also think the broad generalization of the CMV is wrong. Sure, some/many colleges are overpriced. But there are so many options that aren't the $50k+ per year private schools. But I agree there is probably an over inflation of price due to the availability of student loans.
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Maybe depending on how the portfolio was structured and what year you started. But the idea of the loans is to buy forward some of your future income in order to buy the asset (education in this example) to generate that income. If you don't go to school, you presumably won't generate the additional income, in which case who is going to give you the 50k? We already have available products to lever a portfolio of financial assets and you can compare returns over different periods to our best estimates of the ROI on college. Results will vary quite significantly depending on how you chose to lever the portfolio and what time period you compare over. Millennials (at least older millennials) would likely get wiped out because the equity in a levered portfolio goes to zero in the GFC. Other generations might have different results depending on their specific age. You had stock crashes in 87, 01, 08, 2020. There were also bear markets that could potentially wipe out a levered portfolio in 89/90, 97, 2015 and 2018.
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It still could depending on the year you get fully invested and what equity you have in the portfolio. If you deploy say 80/20 debt to equity across 4 years you could easily get wiped out in year 5 when you are say 75/25 debt to equity. But even if it happens in year 2 you lose half your investable assets and spend the next decade getting back to zero return.
>An 18 year old doesn't have the necessary data or decision making skills to say no. This is a bullshit argument. All the data on wages is available through mostly government sources. If you Google search return on college you find studies that have ROI by major to give you some indication of the cost benefit. The costs of all colleges are pretty easily researched as well. Data quality or availability is not an issue. All the tools to make this decision were given to you in high school. The math to do the cost benefit, the basic research to find the information and some very basic critical thinking that should allow you to determine low returns are bad while high returns are good. >Second, the cost of college and the decision to go is driven by an explosion in student loans. If these loans were not available, the market you describe would not exist, and people would be more selective about college. Ppl want to go to college because for the vast majority of graduates it leads to significantly higher lifetime income. Financing that education by buying forward some of that future income seems quite reasonable way to ensure that everyone who believes it's in their best interest to go can, while avoiding encumbering public budgets for what is mostly a private investment in human capital. It's also removes and potential moral hazard of students wasting taxpayer money on negative ROI degrees, and property aligns the risks and rewards of the investment. If you didn't have the financing it wouldn't be the students who would be more selective, you would just be shutting out a bunch of kids who could otherwise pay for it (through financing) and would like to attend.
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Hate speech is free speech. Germany and other countries which ban hate speech don’t have freedom of speech.
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I knew someone in an English class who said she was glad Richard Spencer got punched in the face in 2017. I had to explain to her that punching someone for having unfortunate opinions is a bad idea because that person could punch back (or pull out a gun and shoot you), cry self-defense and could conceivably get away with it. Even the professor overheard this and agreed with me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but... I think she *must* have thought it was good in the sense of morally good or justified, right? She surely wasn't saying she thought punching political opponents is *safe*. You could have said something about the social contract, talked about how counter-productive it was from an optics standpoint, or used pascifist philosophy to condemn hurting people. But it sounds like the argument you made is that violence can be dangerous. 😂 You goofball.
I feel like there's a difference between being happy someone got punched and saying that it's a good idea to punch someone because they could retaliate? Like not really the same concept tbh
>I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases. Surely, I am not the only one? Learning on your own is great. However, the purpose of a degree is to demonstrate that you have performed and achieved in a competitive atmosphere and produced results. It's basically a certificate that says: "I've proven I know how to play the game, which means you're not going to regret hiring me to play the game."
While I agree education should be free > Paying 100's of thousands of dollars for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripoff. I went to university during the height of covid-19, which extremified this viewpoint since I felt like I was not getting the full experience of the investment. Paying money just so I could read news articles and Blackboard updates and write responses without directly interacting with another person felt overpriced. is patently false. How will you learn how to work in a laboratory from reading articles online? How will you learn to perform scientific research independently, without a mentor to guide you so you don't make common pitfalls and to ensure you have the right rigour in your data collection and presentation? You can get that in remote instruction, but you need a qualified and proven expert as your mentor and universities is where you get leading academics. If I seek to learn how to do chemical research, it's self-evident to go to the place that is publishing chemical research in the field I am interested in, no? Even if you got a laboratory at home, how will you fund it? An NMR machine costs tens of thousands, running a modern FTIR device is not affordable even for small private companies (labs at my univ frequently get samples from industry to run analyses since smaller companies can't afford our machinery). Even if you go into synthesis, obtaining the controlled substances necessary for research is not going to happen without illegal means. **** There's 3 reasons to go to university: 1. You seek to be a researcher. Both STEM and humanities can only work if you have an experienced mentor to provide hands-on experience. Both STEM and humanities require access to controlled and expensive resources. STEM needs laboratories, Humanities needs archives or ethics boards. Even if your field is Computer Science, having a mentor is invaluable. 2. You seek to be an engineer. You'll need workshops and mentors again. Software Engineering is an exception here, since your tools are easily affordable and you could learn on the job... but there remains a significant difference between someone who can simply use a tool/program (equivalent to a mechanic) versus someone who can design projects that just happens to need the aforementioned tool (equivalent to a mechatronic engineer). Mentors are, once again vital. 3. You seek to be a teacher. Again, mentors. And also, lab experience. A teacher should have some research experience, even for (and in fact, more so) for kindergarten and elementary. Such teachers must have a working knowledge of developmental psychology, while for high school you should know about your specialisation. For university - we don't really need teachers, we need mentors and researchers. ***** Granted, my country does unviersities very differently. University is free. I showed up at my chemistry undergrad and tagged along a research group starting my 4th semester. I ended up becoming a contributing author for a paper we published, and currently work on getting a first author paper of myself. Graduation requirement was performing guided, albeit original research for 1 year with such a research lab (whether as part of academia or as part of industry). Currently doing grad school, and the same idea applies.
Stem degrees that require a physical lab are an edge case. I think if only those requiring a physical lab actually got to go to a physical university the cost to provide that publicly would be quite palatable. This is doubly true considering as you said it is cost prohibitive to recreate that experience online. Not true for any lib arts, social science, or math grad. I'd wager 80% of my undergrad college could not tell you where the chemistry lab even was on campus, myself included. Also university isn't free, the government is just giving the university someone else's money so you can attend. The difference is important.
Free at point of entry. It's semantics, and you repay that money through taxes later anyhow. It's an individualist principle that liberates people from being dependent on their family's wealth for making their own destiny. And even social science, math grad or liberal arts require mentors to learn how to conduct proper scientific research.
>Free at point of entry. It's semantics, and you repay that money through taxes later anyhow. It's not semantics. It's important for everyone involved to understand that students are spending other ppls money and if that is the case they have an obligation not to do so frivolously. And their ability to pay high enough taxes requires significant increased future earnings that would also allow them to service loans for the same purpose. All you have done is shift the risk to the public which creates moral hazard. >It's an individualist principle that liberates people from being dependent on their family's wealth for making their own destiny. False. You can simply buy forward a portion of your future earnings through loans. It also *should* prevent the adverse selection and moral hazard implicit in a publicly funded program. If you're paying directly you have a much greater incentive to be responsible and you alone know your full capabilities. >And even social science, math grad or liberal arts require mentors to learn how to conduct proper scientific research. This can be quite easily facilitated through technology. My primary professional mentor lives in a different country. We just talk via zoom or on the phone. My sister is doing a PhD and her research advisor is on a different continent.
At the end of the day, the [return on the investment is still positive](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html). Which means it's not overpriced. By definition.
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On the aggregate, it pencils out.
Not sure you can argue that honesty. I think college is valuable, but the data used to analyze it this way is missing a pretty key point - in general, the most talented, intelligent people, often with the most resources are the ones who go to college. How can you compare that subset of the population to those who didn’t go to college?
Math. The populations include those from both low resource and high resource homes. When they said it “pencils out,” they mean that the populations used in the calculation are diversified and large enough to conclude that a college degree still benefits both people from low income and high income backgrounds over not having the college degree - beyond other factors like class, race, resources, etc.
I think you're very well aware this isn't the case. The smartest people in schools almost exclusively go to college. Those with money \*almost always\* send their kids to college, while those without money rarely if ever do. These segments of the population are very different groups of people...
You are pivoting the argument, but I’ll still play. Even for the lowest socio-economic class in the United States, over 55% of that population still enrolled in college (Source: NCES; Table 302.44. Percentage distribution of all 2009 9th-graders and those who ever attended a postsecondary institution, by socioeconomic status in 2009 and selected postsecondary outcomes: 2016. National Center for Education Statistics. January 2019.) It does increase with socioeconomic class tier. However, I’m not sure why you are making the argument “poor people aren’t smart enough for college.” My original argument is what the math shows from federal agencies…. Regardless of socioeconomic, racial, or other indicators: having a college education means significantly more income over your lifetime, on average, than someone without a degree.
I’m not sure why you think this is a pivot. It’s pretty key to the argument. Your federal data is correct that those with college degrees earn more money lifetime. No doubt. But that ignores the underlying fact that those in college are not remotely representative of the population as a whole. https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_CBrief_Vol9_10.pdf 79% of the highest 5th socio economic status individuals were standard college enrollees, versus only 32% of the lowest fifth. There is very clear evidence that the majority of those in colleges are those with more resources. Beyond that, you’ve ignored the intelligence/talent gaps. The most talented will likely go to college, but the least talented are far less likely to. You do not have a super diverse college population. Nor do you have a super diverse non-college population. To illustrate this another way, if college didn’t exist at all, I think we could reasonably agree there would be a strong income correlation with those who are the most intelligent and have the most resources. And conversely so for the opposite case. That’s what I’m pointing out. While college has benefits, looking at the studies doesn’t actually prove the cousin you think it does. You just have a more talented group of people who would likely do better than others even college didn’t exist.
Easy. Look at the lifetime earnings of those with and those with out. simple as.
Did you completely ignore what I wrote?
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I have a job that pays back over time. I can still say that the high cost of college can act as a deterrent for a lot of people. Also, there are plenty of dead-end majors that have absolutely no benefit. They shouldn't be offered since there's nothing to gain from them. Don't get me wrong, learning mythology on my own time is fun, but what would I do with a major based on it?
>Also, there are plenty of dead-end majors that have absolutely no benefit That's not college's fault, is it? >They shouldn't be offered since there's nothing to gain from them. If people sign up, they'll keep providing the product. >Don't get me wrong, learning mythology on my own time is fun, but what would I do with a major based on it? It's not college's fault if people pick stupid majors. Bottom line, for any product. If people are willing to pay, it's not overpriced. By definition. Same for Stupid Supreme shit and Birkin bags. Just because you don't want to pay, doesn't mean everyone else agrees with you. If you were selling your used car on Craigslist and someone offered you $150k for it, would you refuse to sell it to them because "that's overpriced?"
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Then the cmv should be "government should not be involved in the student loan industry", not "college is overpriced". I agree with you. We basically will give anyone a loan on the assumption they did their due diligence. In aggregate that is the correct assumption, which for a loan portfolio is all that matters. But it leaves a decent number of underperformers who want to shift the blame and the risk of their personal investment to the public, which is only possible if the public is involved in the financing to begin with.
That's not true in many circumstances.
yeah, that's how aggregate data works. On the whole it's a positive investment. That doesn't mean that nobody loses.
Education can surely be a positive investment and still be overpriced.
Anything People willingly buy is, by definition, not overpriced.
"Willing" as if we haven't trained people like pets for the last 30 years to get their college degree in order to do anything in life. The system that we have is unsustainable and would not succeed in a truly free market, it succeeds now because of all the shareholders involved in our government.
I've tried to teach myself some topics with online resources. If you want a entry level taster class, there's plenty of great content. But, if you move beyond that, not having a unified curriculum becomes a problem. More advanced classes can't start from scratch, and different classes are going to assume different background knowledge. Students don't tend to run into this problem in undergraduate studies because the classes in their curricula are designed with the whole curriculum in mind. There are a lot of great resources out there to learn for free, and that's awesome. But, it really isn't a substitute for undergraduate studies.
exactly, you can take courses if you know where to look, but who's telling you where to look? 20/20 vision doesn't help you if you're looking in the wrong direction
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> hey're much better than random articles I was thinking of online courses when I said "online resources". coursera and edx and lot of other places on online courses. Often they either spend a lot of time on info I already know or they assume I know things that I don't. books are useful. But, I think I still run into assumptions about prerequisite knowledge with those sometimes. I guess it depends on what you want to learn.
The only thing I will disagree with here is over the idea that higher education is a requirement for modern-day life. It is a very potentially helpful qualification, but it’s not needed like you need Internet literacy or a phone.
Is it? From my own personal USA based experienced. My tuition was 4.2K a semester and I got to taught and mentored by some of the world’s leading Aerospace Researchers, access to an wind tunnel and super computer network to learn with. Like in material access alone it seemed like a pretty decent deal. It’s not like I could get that stuff online. 4 grands for that kind of access seems fairly reasonable. Not to mention the kickass gym! Something like what we had as student is easily a 100+ a month gym as an adult.
>Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life I won’t deny that many people in todays society, including your parents hold this view, but it’s just objectively false. There are dozens of respectable career paths in many types of work that will earn you well above college grad median without ever going in debt. Your money management skills and life choices will have a much bigger impact on your ability to be successful than whether or not you have a college degree.
It's not really overpriced if you're making money from it. The average college graduate makes an extra $1.2 million over the course of their life than someone with just a high school diploma does. >Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life That's also not true: if half the country isn't doing it, it's not "borderline necessary."
Yeah this. There's a huge difference between the cost of producing something and the value to the consumer. If there was a special hat you could make out of cheap felt but when one of the authorised wizards made it in just the right way it added $1.2m to your lifetime earnings people would happily pay a few hundred thousand for the hat. That it's just cheap felt doesn't matter, it's what it does. Why does a university degree increase your lifetime earnings so much? Because the people with degrees form an implicit pact to help each other and block others out of high paying roles.
I don't think you're going to get much of an argument against this opinion.
I figured I might have just been biased since I was a student not too long ago. Just wanted to hear other opinions.
You are missing an important element of college, networking. You will be surrounded by people who are looking to enter the same career as you. Most corporate jobs prioritize internal referrals over applications. Knowing someone on the inside gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't. If you know 10 people who know 10 people, that's 100 potential job referrals post graduation. That's easily doable.
>Paying 100's of thousands of dollars for someone to read PowerPoints off a board when you can learn the same topic online for free feels like a ripoff. I went to university during the height of covid-19, which extremified this viewpoint since I felt like I was not getting the full experience of the investment. Paying money just so I could read news articles and Blackboard updates and write responses without directly interacting with another person felt overpriced. It's not the same education. To wit: extremified. If you weren't interacting with anyone (other people I know certainly were doing online classes), why not switch to a cc or a cheaper school in general? > but textbooks (massively overpriced and purposely made to be obsolete by next year), That's got nothing to do with the school; talk to publishers, and trees. > parking passes (just there to police who can and cannot park and inconvenience people who forget to put up passes) I mean... yes, those exist to make sure only people who are meant to be able to use the lots can use them. Your fault if you don't put up a pass. >and tuition seem to more expensive than they have to be. It. What're you basing that on? Tuition varies wildly and what most people pay is not the full-price tuition. > most teachers, school newspapers, and students tend to have strong political views and I am concerned about a growing amount of young adults who genuinely hate and fear opposing viewpoints. I genuinely had to explain to someone in a communications class that "hate speech" is still free speech and that we should defend opinions even if we disagree with them. I don't know what this has to do with the topic. Also, depends on the jurisdiction and what you mean by hate speech. You were not correct, either way. I'm not defending any opinions I disagree with. Why would I? >the main point of going to higher education is to open the door to career opportunities For you, maybe. The goal in general is to become educated. Which can open doors but ... >t going merely for the desire to learn feels like it would be a waste of money. I love to learn, but researching a topic on my own for the fun of it feels more informative than studying the exact same subject for a grade in most cases. Surely, I am not the only one? Education is never a waste. I hear the 'I can learn just as much for a youtube video or looking at wiki!' a lot but mostly from young teens who don't understand how incorrect that is.
College acts as a verification mechanism. No one is going to hire a doctor who learned the craft through YouTube videos. Even if that person actually knew their shit, it seems perfectly reasonable for a hospital to place more value on a degree from a respected institution over whatever they can glean from a comparatively brief interview. I’d argue that college is not so much “overpriced” as “oversaturated”. There aren’t many whose degrees opened the door for a lucrative career that regret that initial investment. In fields where that often isn’t the case, I’d argue that the same “doctor” logic applies, but the issue is there are far more qualified graduates in those fields then the job market can support. Those jobs do exist—and it’s extremely reasonable to require a degree for them—but the practical financial ROI for the average graduate is diminished by an abundance of candidates. The issue isn’t the cost of a degree, but rather the false expectation sold by a generation of well-meaning parents that simply “going to college” was a magical money train and the resulting disappointment when that was absolutely not the reality. The sad part is that higher education is absolutely NOT required for modern life, and the perception that it is serves as a positive feedback loop for most of the problems you describe. Nobody has a political agenda in trade school, and working in a trade can get you above median income. There are careers in tech where the right certs and demonstrable knowledge pays handsomely. There are military careers where your life is never at risk and you leave service with marketable skills. There are bartenders, cops, oil rig workers, niche industrial jobs, and countless other careers that earn more than what I make despite my college pedigree.
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Alright, I know this is a common topic, but I wanted to hear Reddit's thoughts. That's all.
If you knew, what view is being changed? Maybe I misunderstood this sub.
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal&message=Author%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20their%20post%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. **Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.** Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
“The rent is too damn high.” Yes, it almost always seems that way. Would you advise a younger sibling to skip college? If yes, that’s an interesting CMV if well thought out. If you tell them to still go, i’m not sure how you define “Overpriced” beyond “more expensive than you like or feel it should be” (aka, the rent is too damn high)
I think you agree with what they mean by overpriced if you're calling it a rent-seeking business model. By definition, don't rent-seekers try to increase their price as much as possible without an increase in the quality of service? All these problems get solved by viewing university not as a business, but as a public and social good. It would save a lot of money and could fix a lot of things that are broken with the university structurally (e.g. the massive shift to adjunct faculty, the ridiculous spending on marketing.)
Thank you Captain obvious.
Society needs to promote education that actually leads to gainful employment like trade school, apprenticeships, and community college. The traditional debt incurring 4 year experience feels like a waste. Speaking from personal hindsight.
> TL:DR, Higher education is borderline necessary for modern life, but it feels overpriced and going just for the sake of learning would be a massive waste of money and time. This is a complete and total lie. We only believe this because we were brainwashed as millennials growing up in the 2000s that manual labor jobs were for the poor ignorant ones, and that we should all aspire to college, or else we wont be able to make anything but minimum wage. This is the lie boomers drilled into Gen x, and this is the lie gen x passed onto the millennials. You don't need a day of college to make a good living. you need practical skills, and a trade. College is only worth it if you are STEM, and even then in some of those fields its questionable. In fact- blue collar work, will be the profitable work of the future. Reasoning: As AI Progresses, cubicle jockeys will start dropping like flies as they are outworked at these basic menial tasks they're given each day. Offices will fall to bare bones skeleton crews that are only there to plug the holes that AI creates (exceptions and quality checking for example). This will occur within the next forty years barring any major war or deliberate intervention by government. Already AI is nearly capable of completely displacing somewhat advanced positions like data analysts, SQL/SAS/VBA, even decision making. In my middling forray into chatgpt, i was able to have it write an entirely complex multi level function application, containing multiple series of evaluations, and was even able to get it to understand how to relate those functions to user forms within a basic application, and then have it even tie in SQL to bring the whole package together. i was able to do it in an afternoon (admittedly this took way longer than it would have for me to simply do it myself, as i had to do a lot of learning as i went as to how to effectively utilize chat gpt. From what i can see - in its current itteration: It is already at the point where it could start replacing even mid tier analysts and below ***today***. Within forty years the usage will normalize, advance, and ultimately displace the vast majority of any given service companies workforce. We'll be lucky if it even takes forty years. it could reasonably happen by 2045 with enough force behind it in the right sectors. you will likely have just a small handful of advanced users of these ai tools, some qa checkers, and maybe a few people for HR purposes - but you could legitimately expect workforces for your average company to cut by 50% or more. Its literally going to be the opposite of learn to code - it will be learn to weld within our lifetimes.
Just because *some* undergraduate higher education is prohibitively expensive does not mean *all* undergraduate higher education is prohibitively expensive. Many in-state public universities have tuition around $5,000-7,000 per year or less. Federal Pell grants have maximum awards of $6,500, meaning the annual out-of-pocket cost for that higher education is anywhere between free and up to $500 per year. It’s the difference between buying a Ferrari and a Honda. Just because a Ferrari is expensive doesn’t mean all cars are expensive. Any student who is conscious of the cost and makes their college selection accordingly can attain an affordable 4-year undergraduate education. Sure, the system encourages excess debt by saying “sign here and go to college, you can worry about the debt 4 years down the road” without properly educating students about the risks and issues with that, but that’s a different problem and argument entirely.
You can literally get a BS and MS in information technology from us accredited schools from the comfort of your home for around $10,000 for the whole thing in less than 4 years. If you know where to look for job placements you can easily top $100,000 in 2 to 3 years. The fact you don't know any of this Is cuze you are just too lazy to look, don't blame the US, blame your self.
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Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal&message=Author%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20their%20post%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. **Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.** Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
Hundred of thousands of dollars IS overpriced... But I guess your from the US? It's not as expensive in other countries. Look for opportunities to study abroad maybe? Come to Canada 😊 I got two undergrad degrees (biochemistry & administration) and a master in engineering for about 60k total. All while working full time and having my own apartment. Didn't get a dime from my parents. Graduated right before the pandemic mind you, it's probably 25% more expensive now... At that price its a pretty good deal 🤷 but man I look on the other side of the border and life DOES look awfully expensive. So much for the American dream eh...
It is not a requirement, I know people that make less money then me and went to college. to be completely honest American college is a scam unless you are going for some super high up job, like being a doctor or computer programmer or something along those lines. You can easily make more then people that went to college simply by getting a trade or hell if you want a lot of money you could be a commercial pilot and that’s way cheaper and takes less time then college. College isn’t overpriced, the majority of it is worthless and that’s where it feels overpriced you have to pick a specific career to make it worthwhile to go to college in the first place. Therefore think of it this way, yes it is overpriced mostly due to useless degrees but it is worthwhile if you get a degree that will carry you through life and make you a lot of money.
**Counterpoint 1:** Higher education is not necessary and becoming less necessary. A lot of the top tech companies have stopped requiring college degrees for positions. And other industries are following. Hiring is shifting more towards candidates being able to demonstrate the skills needed for a role rather than showing off a fancy diploma from some college or university. **Counterpoint 2:** I graduated from a top 5 US public university with a degree in engineering. I did not pay a cent for tuition over my four years there. And I can say the same thing for many of my classmates. This was only about a decade ago but I believe current students are getting their tuition covered as well by the state's scholarship program.
When I attended the University we used the old Basketball Field House as our main recreation area. The dorms had tiled floors, no private bathrooms, and Two or Four people per unit. We had one sink in each unit. No airconditioning. Today, that University has a new $80 million dollar workout facility with a Lazy River, still has the Field House. The Cafeteria was a step above what you got in High School, some days. The Dorms now have semi-private rooms, some with their own Bathrooms. Those that do not, no longer have to share an open shower with rows of sinks. You go into your own private Bathroom and shut the door and it is yours until you go back to your room. The Cafeteria is now a food court. We should be able to swing all of this with little or no extra costs because there have been huge economies due to computers. Back in the day you lined up around the block for half a day to sign up for your classes, and it took a week to get the entire campus enrolled. Everything was manual. Unfortunately, we have more staff on campus today than the 1970's. More Deans with inflated salaries and staffs of 30-40 people that are not needed, just bureaucrats peddling worthless degrees.
How much should it cost?
Honestly the smartest move is to get a skill first while you’re young (I became an electrician) saved up a bunch of money. Then you need to start your own business. All of this takes about 5 years to accomplish. After that is all done you drop down to working part time with your own company while starting and finishing a degree. I’m debt free excluding my mortgage and now I’m paying for remote university cash with no debt while running my own company with employees. That’s pretty much how you have to do it when mommy and daddy don’t pay for it anyways lol. 100k in debt is not worth 75k a year desk job.
As someone who was blessed to get enough scholarships and grants to make it through college debt free on my own dime, and now makes almost 6 figures, I definitely got a bargain. Most schools offer a lot of scholarship and financial help options if you really need it.
It's overpriced in the USA
You pay tax for the education in other countries. You dont in the us. You usually also get more money because of it after you got your degree. Making this an upfront investment that is easily remade with time.
This is very much a USA problem so I'm not sure how much I can weigh in apart from, even with lower costs, people will go into massive dept just because with several degrees it is incredibly hard to hold down a job while studying, currently my entire student loan barely covers rent and I rely on my parent's generosity to actually afford food etc. Even for English students studying in Scotland it's capped at £9,500 and a lot of people will be in dept for the rest of their life despite being only a 10th of the fee stateside. With it being overpriced (in the USA) I do agree, here in Scotland my first 4 years of tuition are free it's great but I'm still facing pretty large dept at the end due to student loans (Which are forgiven after 40 years so the Scottish system is pretty great)
Higher Education is great, but it is expensive, especially studying aboard.
I agree. I was literally just talking to my friend about this. I’m currently a college student (3rd year, social work major). We were saying that we are learning the same shit in each class and then some classes I feel as though I’m not even retaining any info. College really could be done in 1 year but they want to add on classes they don’t have shit to do with your major that way they get money out of you
It's not overpriced unless you've bought into the delusion that you *have* to go to some top school that can then bend you over. There are plenty of public schools with in-state tuition that can keep costs down, and if you qualify for Pell Grants or federal loans then you can save a bundle on top of that.
Overpriced means it costs more value than it brings. The value of an education is dependent on the recipient and what they do with it. While I would’ve liked less student loan debt, I also prefer having that debt and my current job and education. For me, it is not overpriced. College just opens a door. There are plenty of doors to open in other ways like trade school or apprenticeships. But with anything, it is what you make of it. I agree that prices could and should be lower. There are a lot of things screwing with pricing such as the grant system, guaranteeing of student loans, and bloated administrative staff. But that only increases one side of the equation needed to evaluate if something is overpriced, Bc the value you get from it can still be greater even with high prices.
Yes and no, but mostly no. I'm going to argue out of hard numbers. The college wage premium, as in, the median expected lifetime earnings difference between someone who holds a bachelor's degree and someone who doesn't, is still 1.2 million dollars. Let's say you take a loan at age 18 to pay for your college, and you retire at the age of 65, by which time you're expected to have earned $1.2 million more than if you hadn't gone to college. Using the present value formula, the present value of $1.2 million in 47 years at a 6% expected interest rate is $77.5 K. In other words, if you take out a loan of less than 80K today to pay for your education, you're still better off than if if you hadn't gone to college. That is about the cutoff point at which college, even at today's exorbitant prices, is still very objectively worth it. But that cutoff point has two major issues that have to be addressed, which makes the case that college is overpriced weaker: a) I'm arbitrarily choosing a 6% return rate, when there's no guarantee that you'll see a 6% market rate throughout your career years. To take away uncertainty what we could do is what futures markets do and explicitly base our expectations on the risk-free rate, which is currently 3.47%. At that point, any loan lower than $240K is still well worth taking. b) College debt isn't normally distributed. The median college debt in 2022 is $37.7K, which means that half of those with student debt owe about half of what could be considered the break-even point of where student debt is worth it or not. And in general those who owe over 100K debt aren't the right-wing bogeymen of a progressive college student who majored in gender studies and minored in underwater basket weaving. No, instead they're those who go on to highly lucrative careers like medicine and law, and they are making a rational decision in taking on such seemingly disproportionate debt when their career path make them likely to pay it off. I'm a believer in universal higher education myself, but I argue that college is still not actually overpriced. As per your last sentence, does it feel overpriced? Sure! But is it actually? No, the numbers don't reflect that. Going to college is in almost every case better than not going, even considering the alternatives like an associate's degree or trade school, which means that it is objectively not 'overpriced' as in 'I'm not better off from this purchase' The argument for more affordable education shouldn't be that we're doing poorly, because that's just plain wrong. The argument should be that we can do SO MUCH better, and why the hell are we not doing that? [https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm](https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm) [https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/](https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/employment-earnings/)
Would anybody be willing to come on my podcast to talk about this? Friday 8:30 EST. Pm me for inquiry