Posted on 03/19/2021 4:45:21 PM PDT by karpov
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts within the higher education policy space were projecting that four-year colleges could face a loss of up to 20 percent in fall enrollment. While these predictions never materialized, the political infatuation with college enrollment figures is not a new phenomenon.
Barack Obama proclaimed the orthodox view of college in 2009: Sending every young person to college is necessary to both promote equity and maintain US competitiveness in the world. Under this view, more federal investment to push high school graduates into college is a “human capital investment” that leads to higher lifetime earnings.
However, little research has focused on what effect the higher price and debt burdens of college have had on college wage premiums and job opportunities for graduates.
Studies that observe the college wage premium (the ratio of wages that college graduates make in comparison with high school graduates) find that college graduate earnings significantly outpaced those of high school graduates in the 1980s and 1990s, but have largely stagnated since the turn of the century.
The significance of this stagnation in the college wage premium over the past 15 years is important because this emerging pattern may complicate the orthodox view of college leading to higher lifetime earnings. Over the same 15-year period, the cost of college has grown by more than 50 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
If you’re going to college to master an in-demand skill (medicine, accounting, engineering, etc.), you’ll do fine. If you’re going for any other reason, you’re wasting both time and money. Think about learning a trade instead. Plumbers make much more money than do poets.
I can no longer recommend university for most you g people. Welding, plumbing, painting, specialty farming, auto mechanic, food truck, an electrician all pay better than a BA/BS
Another advantage of these career paths is that the application of these trades require physical presence. They cannot be out-sourced.
There are plenty of very well paying jobs if you are willing to get dirty. College degrees not needed.
Before the colleges stuck their collective nose into computer science a degree wasn’t required. All that mattered was competence. But now.... well I learned as an engineer that I could tell when a PhD had written a program.... unnecessary complexity.
Agreed, my son had zero interest in college, we never push college.
He worked a variety of trades, some were quite grueling, but he found his niche. His company pays for all his training and certifications (mold remediation , asbestos removal, demolition). He makes good money. He is 25, is salary, supervises his own crew, drives a company truck and has his own accounts.
My other son is doing college online, getting a degree in accounting.
Back in the early ‘70s I worked at Mickey D’s for a dollar an hour and paid my way through my first year of college on that income alone. Tuition that first year was $300 a semester.
College tuition has increased 1400% since then, an order of magnitude greater than inflation.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/College-tuition-and-fees/price-inflation
The only reason the colleges were able to rip off the students like that was because the government got involved in “student loans” and handed them out like candy to babies.
I am all for student loan forgiveness if it comes out of the endowments of colleges and universities that harvested dumb 18-year olds for their student loan money then discarded them like a used Trojan.
Part of the problem is that colleges will cheerfully lie to young people. I majored in chemistry. The ‘chemistry major’ handout that I was given listed all science classes I needed. It also listed all the job opportunities that were available to a chemistry major.
Out of curiosity, I also asked for the handout for history majors. According to that handout, history majors had better job opportunities than physicians or engineers!
There oughta be a law against that.
“...Barack Obama proclaimed the orthodox view of college in 2009: Sending every young person to college is necessary to both promote equity and maintain US competitiveness in the world. ...”
Yeah, riiight. That cretin went to college and proved that some degrees are not worth **it.
Some accomplishment, the dolt couldn’t even complete a coherent sentence without the electronic aid of a prompter.
And he did have one talent: the ability to totally screw up a successful country.
However they can be in-sourced to illegals. There is an increasing flood of hard working mexicans coming in.
According to that handout, history majors had better job opportunities than physicians or engineers!
How do you define "better" in this case?
How about community colleges on a trimester system? No need for summers off. The idea is to get to work asap. B4 age 20. Once certified there’s no need for a 40 hour work week when starting out. Allow one to mature as they go.
> According to that handout, history majors had better job opportunities than physicians or engineers!...How do you define “better” in this case? <
“Better” in the sense that there were many more jobs listed. “With a degree in history you can...” (what followed was a long list of great jobs: professor of history, museum curator, social policy analyst, etc.).
So if you were an 18-year-old kid with an interest in history, you’d think you had found the perfect degree for you. But what the handout didn’t mention was that your chance of landing any of those jobs was slim to none.
“How about community colleges on a trimester system? No need for summers off. The idea is to get to work asap. B4 age 20. Once certified there’s no need for a 40-hour work week when starting out. Allow one to mature as they go.”
That might be a workable idea. However, I’m a STEM type and have taught both at the grad level (great students) and also at our local community college. The CC students by and large were not even at the high school level of my younger days. We’re going to have to really ramp up the CCs to make this work. I realize, of course, that we’re not talking tensor calculus at a CC, but I was rather underwhelmed with the student ability to handle simple grammar.
History is, or should be, the prelaw program.
But a history major should also teach history, not an education major with a reading field.
> But a history major should also teach history, not an education major with a reading field. <
Agreed. University schools of education should be abolished. You want to teach history? Get a degree in history. And then spend three months observing a master history teacher.
Side note: I was an urban high school teacher for decades. The education majors were, as the old saying goes, the weakest link. And when any of them got promoted to principal - ouch! Look out below!
The Marxist "march through the institutions" will continue.
Got it.
Right. But, you see, those “museum curater “ jobs may only open up 16 in a year. But there will be 1600 chemistry degreed positions every month.
But almost every white collar government job now requires a degree.
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