The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
This is really lowest common denominator reporting, on top of lowest common denominator sampling, and lowest common denominator question design.
A far better approach would be in trying to test for a specific hypothesis, e.g. "I believe confidence in higher ed is falling due to XYZ" reasons.
But, in the context of Gallup, I think this kind of research is really there not to answer questions, but to provide a sort of pre-signal to aide in hypothesis generation. Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
Gallup does good work, but this kind of omnibus question is not really meant to answer any questions.
Source: I work in B2B survey and interview research.
> The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%.
It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.
The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.
There's extensive information on how this poll is conducted here. [1] It's a bit different than normal because it's not a one-off survey, but rather a long-term recurring polling. This particular series has been going for 23 years now. I'd guess they added the higher education aspects in 2015 (since that's when the graphs begin). Higher education took a really unexpected turn. We hit 'peak higher education' in 2011 [2], but everybody at the time was expecting it to continue growing rapidly as it had in the decades prior.
My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college.
I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.
I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.
A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back.
The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.
I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.
It depends on the size and terms of the loans. I still pay about $75/mo at 3.8% for my loans (20 year later). Going away to college was far, far, far more valuable to me (in terms of fun, adventure, etc) than the cost of that monthly bill.
The real crime was tricking these kids to go to out of state schools for $60k a year that offer the exact same curriculum as their in state school going for $12k a year.
College has a positive ROI in most cases, despite the high price tag.
There are exceptions like the people with useless $200K degrees working at coffee shops, but you have to ignore a lot of common sense to get that far. For most people, college really does have a positive ROI.
Higher education is not a great filter anymore. Everyone goes to college - and most students simply don’t have the fundamental intelligence for it to mean much. Colleges have also changed - there are large numbers of activist degrees that seem to not really be serious fields. People get degrees in such fields that aren’t economically valuable and then struggle in the job market. If you’re studying something that personally interests you but isn’t useful to others (as the job market suggests), aren’t you just doing a hobby?
And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.
The author should also mention the increase in competition in the labor market and the lack of labor protection laws to prevent outsourcing. Statistically speaking, a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. A lot of the negative sentiments I conjecture come from the higher standards across the board and the ubiquity of a bachelor's degree in the labor market.
> a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings.
How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
I like to refer to higher education as legacy education. As someone who skipped college and jumped right into the workforce after the dot com boom, I was renting an apartment/paying my own bills/managing my own affairs by the time I was 21. I had to figure everything out on my own. I was making 60k/year in a big city maintaining websites and helping the small media company I worked at with IT problems. My comp is in the high 200s/low 300s these days. No formal education.
When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character.
I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.
I think youre 100% right. Taking it further, it's legacy education because there are no effective gatekeepers to information anymore. You can learn anything you want now for free. If the goal is to learn how to do something you want to do, universities aren't worth the expense. They gatekeep credentials now, not education. I personally do not think that status quo can continue for very long.
I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
Ok, but you do realize that living on 60k in a large city is not particularly easy these days? You'll be putting down half your salary to rent, at the minimum. Same applies to the other jobs: sure, you build character. But you're also perpetually one car accident away from financial ruin.
Higher education is personally very challenging and not how people were designed. Even those with some standard deviation above the mean aren't meant to study books all day.
This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps.
It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning).
In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting.
When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional.
Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.
When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match.
The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.
I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.
I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.
I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
It seems all the concerns boil down to economics. I don't think people did nearly as much cost-benefit analysis in the past. The fact that college was affordable meant you were freer to experiment and enjoy yourself. Now that the price is so high, it entails pressure to get your money's worth. Thus creating a vicious cycle.
Unusually, I don't think "all economics" is the right take. The political aspect of this seems to be significant. Education isn't being seen as a neutral path for people who are bettering themselves, these poll figures suggest it is a politically active institution.
The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market, where government regulation suppresses the supply of accredited universities. I think we're seeing some change with the latter supply (e.g. community college, online degrees, etc) but demand for a U.S. college degree still stands strong on the global market from international students.
It would be nice to get data on yearly university applications and do an empirical analysis on supply and demand.
It is all of the following factors: restricted supply, price indifferent consumers, free credit, on-academic competition between colleges, high regulation, and administrative bloat.
If you set these factors aside, there is no reason people couldn't get a legitimate bachelors for a few thousand dollars a year.
you could literally run an engineering program using class recordings from MIT and Stanford out of a community center like AA meetings.
I'm not so sure it's a cycle. Ultimately, employers' requiring a college degree for more and more jobs is what drives the increasing demand, and the increasing demand results in increasing prices. And employers require a college degree because they need some kind of coarse selection screen, and don't seem to have any other way to distinguish capable applicants from incapable ones.
Am I missing something here? The figures quoted in the opening paragraph suggest to me that confidence is rising.
> Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
It is confusing because the author was really messy with her use of the figures to where that sentence reads nonsensically. The actual Gallup news article that is cited by the article posted is much clearer. The posted article reads as if it was just a re-arranged/scrambled word salad of the original article to the point where some parts no longer make sense.
The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%.
The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
Looks like there is a "some" option. For some reason the author quotes one number from one year, a second from the other, and ignores the third option in both. Ignore "not sure" respondents in polls at your own peril.
I personally lack confidence in higher education because I'm neurodivergent, and high school pushed a method of learning that is not compatible with the way in which my brain works. They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate - it is the source of the "how will this ever be useful later in life?" that is oft-cited of students.
I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out.
I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself.
I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.
I think most people learn the same way you describe. But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work.
I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
"They They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate..."
I think this is true with many people, myself included with some subjects (or certain topics within subjects).
That said, with some topics I found the subject matter sufficiently stimulating in and of itself to hold my complete interest and attention. For example, I immediately grasped the fundamentals of calculus and understood why it is so important.
I cannot say the same about linear algebra and matrices which I was taught before knowing why they are so important in physics and elsewhere. Frankly, back then I found it to be boring, tedious stuff. Now I'm aware of its proper context and use my attitude towards the subject has reversed completely.
Same when it came to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in physics, they were a bore and a pain (I was much more interested in electrodynamics and such). Similarly, my attitude to thermodynamics has changed completely, I'd now argue that thermodynamics is one of the most important (and fundamental) parts of physics. Had I been taught why thermodynamics is so important and given interesting instances I'm sure my attitude would have been very different.
Also, I was never much good at learning foreign languages, I recall whilst still at school doing my homework. I'd lie on my bed and bash my head against my French textbook whingeing to myself and asking why the hell am I learning this damned stuff. That attitude changed completely when I went to live in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language.
In some ways I've envied those students in my class who could suck up information like a sponge and regurgitate it verbatim during examinations. That said, I had no trouble equalling and often bettering them in topics that held my intersest. More to the fact my fundamental understanding of the subject was often much stronger.
You're right, teaching subject matter to students that's seemingly irrelevant for them at the time it's taught, is, in my opinion not only counterproductive and often a waste of time but also it's likely to turn potentially good students away from the subject altogether.
From my experience, when teaching a subject including context and relevance is just about as important as the subject matter itself. The trouble is that the people who set the syllabuses and write textbooks are so often the very same people who were good at regurgitating stuff verbatim in exams. They become teachers because of said skill and they never fully understand that many students simply don't learn in the same way that they do.
>This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media.
There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2]
I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines.
Long ago, I was told that it was only worth paying for College if you were going to be an Professional Engineer or a Nurse. It seems that advice has held true.
I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree.
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
You only end up 100k in the hole if you eschew your perfectly good public in state option. That's part of the reason. Public colleges recruiting at high schools out of state are straight up doing it in bad faith.
> I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid.
Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that.
Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1].
I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years.
They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived).
University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not.
They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential.
I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.
The other side of the equation is mindless algorithmic HR hiring practices though, where a college degree is treated much the same as a vendor training certificate.
The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
When employers just want to see the credential, then students will just do what it takes to get the credential. And so many employers (needlessly IMO) use the credential to gatekeep access to professional jobs. Employers have turned universities into shams where you pay $100K, wait four years, and pop out with a paper that says "I can be employed."
i use to play with the idea to provide books, a bed, laundry and food for free. Periodic tests serve only to throw you out. Nothing fancy, a basic meal.
If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
Well since the 1970s the official policy by the US govt is the STEM pipeline is for making more STEM workers. Broad perspective is basically 50 years by the wayside. It’s completely intended and unsurprising you know few with liberal independence.
You get what you measure for and well, good luck measuring abstracts like 'a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life'. Especially when you never ask what their ambitions in life were, or if they are anything remotely achievable or assisted by college. In that light is it any surprise that instead of getting the mother-and-apple-pie you get certificate mills?
> According to a new Gallup poll, Americans are losing the thread with higher education. Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable?
It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down:
> 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse.
Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring.
Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not?
It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.
[+] [-] simpaticoder|1 year ago|reply
The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
[+] [-] abakker|1 year ago|reply
A far better approach would be in trying to test for a specific hypothesis, e.g. "I believe confidence in higher ed is falling due to XYZ" reasons.
But, in the context of Gallup, I think this kind of research is really there not to answer questions, but to provide a sort of pre-signal to aide in hypothesis generation. Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
Gallup does good work, but this kind of omnibus question is not really meant to answer any questions.
Source: I work in B2B survey and interview research.
[+] [-] throwaway42668|1 year ago|reply
Confidence in higher education to do what?
[+] [-] agrajag|1 year ago|reply
It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.
The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.
[+] [-] somenameforme|1 year ago|reply
[1] - https://www.gallup.com/175307/gallup-poll-social-series-meth...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
[+] [-] rr808|1 year ago|reply
I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.
I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.
System seems screwed up.
[+] [-] Aleksdev|1 year ago|reply
The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.
I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.
[+] [-] standardUser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
There are exceptions like the people with useless $200K degrees working at coffee shops, but you have to ignore a lot of common sense to get that far. For most people, college really does have a positive ROI.
[+] [-] chii|1 year ago|reply
they aren't "tricked". They saw the last generation's results of going to college, without thinking for themselves and making a better decision.
[+] [-] blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago|reply
And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guccigav|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory
[+] [-] cm2187|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] randomdata|1 year ago|reply
How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
[+] [-] Eumenes|1 year ago|reply
When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character.
I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.
[+] [-] big-green-man|1 year ago|reply
I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
[+] [-] saagarjha|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _the_inflator|1 year ago|reply
This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps.
It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning).
In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting.
When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional.
Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.
[+] [-] satisfice|1 year ago|reply
The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.
I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.
I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.
I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
[+] [-] tootie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] guccigav|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|1 year ago|reply
If you set these factors aside, there is no reason people couldn't get a legitimate bachelors for a few thousand dollars a year.
you could literally run an engineering program using class recordings from MIT and Stanford out of a community center like AA meetings.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cardamomo|1 year ago|reply
> Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
[+] [-] TeaBrain|1 year ago|reply
The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-educat...
[+] [-] Jtsummers|1 year ago|reply
The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
[+] [-] amalcon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LoganDark|1 year ago|reply
I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out.
I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself.
I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.
[+] [-] kenjackson|1 year ago|reply
I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
[+] [-] hilbert42|1 year ago|reply
I think this is true with many people, myself included with some subjects (or certain topics within subjects).
That said, with some topics I found the subject matter sufficiently stimulating in and of itself to hold my complete interest and attention. For example, I immediately grasped the fundamentals of calculus and understood why it is so important.
I cannot say the same about linear algebra and matrices which I was taught before knowing why they are so important in physics and elsewhere. Frankly, back then I found it to be boring, tedious stuff. Now I'm aware of its proper context and use my attitude towards the subject has reversed completely.
Same when it came to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in physics, they were a bore and a pain (I was much more interested in electrodynamics and such). Similarly, my attitude to thermodynamics has changed completely, I'd now argue that thermodynamics is one of the most important (and fundamental) parts of physics. Had I been taught why thermodynamics is so important and given interesting instances I'm sure my attitude would have been very different.
Also, I was never much good at learning foreign languages, I recall whilst still at school doing my homework. I'd lie on my bed and bash my head against my French textbook whingeing to myself and asking why the hell am I learning this damned stuff. That attitude changed completely when I went to live in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language.
In some ways I've envied those students in my class who could suck up information like a sponge and regurgitate it verbatim during examinations. That said, I had no trouble equalling and often bettering them in topics that held my intersest. More to the fact my fundamental understanding of the subject was often much stronger.
You're right, teaching subject matter to students that's seemingly irrelevant for them at the time it's taught, is, in my opinion not only counterproductive and often a waste of time but also it's likely to turn potentially good students away from the subject altogether.
From my experience, when teaching a subject including context and relevance is just about as important as the subject matter itself. The trouble is that the people who set the syllabuses and write textbooks are so often the very same people who were good at regurgitating stuff verbatim in exams. They become teachers because of said skill and they never fully understand that many students simply don't learn in the same way that they do.
[+] [-] Barrin92|1 year ago|reply
This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media.
There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2]
I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines.
[1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
[2]https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2023/08/14/30e9ffad-...
[+] [-] BrandonMarc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] declan_roberts|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|1 year ago|reply
I've never pushed my child towards College.
[+] [-] declan_roberts|1 year ago|reply
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
It's cruel and immoral and must change.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|1 year ago|reply
That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid.
Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that.
Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1].
I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years.
They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived).
[1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...
[+] [-] colechristensen|1 year ago|reply
University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not.
They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential.
I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.
[+] [-] derbOac|1 year ago|reply
The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway14356|1 year ago|reply
If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
[+] [-] meroes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WhatsTheBigIdea|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] richardanaya|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesliudotcc|1 year ago|reply
This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable?
It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down:
> 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse.
Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring.
Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not?
It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.
[+] [-] profsummergig|1 year ago|reply
Those who can't afford it won't indulge.
Those who can, will, because IYKYK.