People aren't being educated, they're being credentialed, and you can no longer assume the quality of a credential. I will trust 100 of 100 people who can coherently explain a system or process over people purportedly credentialed for a thing.
It's far easier to make more money in trades, or to earn experience and work outside traditional career ladders with no degree. These days you can gain experience in technical domains and even without certifications or degrees you can get to the top 5% of paying jobs. Not all jobs, not everywhere, but it's very, very common to see experience exceptions. Prove you can do a thing, that you're good at a thing, and that matters far more than a degree.
The best you can assume from a degree is that a person has enough persistence to stick it out for 4 years on a singular goal. In rare instances, their capabilities are going to align well with the best of what their credentials imply, and they'll actually be exemplary.
Most of the time, in my experience, degrees are nothing more than attendance slips, these days. Congratulations, you're literate and showed up.
- The public school system now acts as though its only goal is college prep
- Above means that many of the kids most likely to excel at trades (i.e. the hard workers) go to college, because if you work hard at HS you will both get the credentials needed to get into college and be told it's the right path for you
- The kids who slacked at High School often also slack at the trades and switch to a minimum-ish wage job where they won't get fired for being on their phones for 50% of their clocked hours.
Well, also that working in trades are long days that are hard on your body in a feast or famine industry. Vs being an engineer is easy on the body, barely 8 hours of work most days, and you get paid vacation, good health insurance, etc.
My dad is a career electrician who discouraged me from getting into the trades by hiring me as a teenager. He'd often point out that the engineers on job sites were paid more than both of us put together and they got to chill out in the A/C most of the time, and they came to the site later and left earlier than we did.
I do genuinely enjoy designing/building/fixing things. But the reality is, I'm much better off using my brain for work, and tinkering in the garage for fun. Anyone smart enough to be a great tradesperson is smart enough to do that calculus.
"standards going down"
and "degrees are nothing more than attendance slips"
What do you think a degree should be? I think because of selection effects, it's always been hard to figure out if universities actually do anything. Did the ivies educate people the best? Or did they just have the most rigorous admissions process to let the best people in. With an increase in the number of white collar workers, we've inherently had to lower the standards.
From the article:
“Oftentimes, people say that not everybody should go to college, and that these two-year programs, these trade schools, are really good,” Strohl said. “Ask them where they’re sending their kids.”
We're in this moment where I think everyone wants to talk about burning everything down, but at least for now, the real losers are the people who buy too much into it without a solid alternative plan. Entrepeneurs may do well, but they were never the ones to listen to the median perspective on how to approach life.
The only change is that there is a much more cynical feeling about the experience. School spirit is out. People see it as "a ripoff I must endure to get a decent job and be taken seriously."
I graduated years ago. When my college (major state uni) called asking for a donation, I laughed the guy off the phone. The idea of "school spirit" seems like a joke to me, as it does for many students these days.
The new cope is to see if you can't do it as cheaply as possible, lop off a year, get scholarships, do a bunch of AP courses prior, etc.
Basically, a lot of students see the process as a box to check as if they were standing in line at the DMV to get their diploma.
I personally took a gap year working at a startup mid college, and as much as I enjoyed working I still ended up coming back to college purely for those two reasons.
Has it? Is there data behind this? The only thing I've seen so far is hot takes from tech CEO's.
Some of this is back of the napkin math of degree costs having risen so much, but also likelihood of using your degree or getting a professional job having fallen.
At the same time - I’ve always been naturally good at tech. I could imagine when I was younger a CS degree being useful. Now, there are certainly gaps in my knowledge, but I’m well past the bootstrapping phase.
Also, I think a good bit of people are pushing anti-college sentiment as a way to keep other peoples' kids out of college, saving space for theirs and reducing competition for jobs. I've run into quite a few white collar professions that espouse "trades" (generically, of course) as a clearly better alternative to university, but aren't pushing their kids in that direction.
Real "college backlash" won't come until degree requirements fall for careers. Which is not something I see happening.
Everyone wants to look at sentiment and enrollment numbers alone, but the demographic outlook is a huge factor in all of this.
https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
>U.S. Nonresident Enrollment
>Since 2010, attendance is up 36.8%.
Also, US births peaked around 18 years ago, and:
>The only jurisdictions to see an increase in the number of students enrolled since 2010 are New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho, Delaware, and Texas, as well as the District of Columbia.
The one thing I would say that I agree about however is there is a difference in a person that went to college vs one that didn't. It's not exactly what they learned, but the filter they had to punish themselves through to say "I finished college". And yes, there is no other filter that does that. You can find people like that who didn't go to college too, but the "filter" is a convenient thing for employers.
We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters and get rid of this entire college thing. The filter works just as well in those scenarios without putting people in 100k of debt.
But then in the previous breath you said it’s a scam? What makes it a scam? You just said yourself that it is bonafide proof of a base ability to follow through and proof of some non-zero level of knowledge absorption.
If you didn’t go to school you’d just be telling your prospective employer “hey don’t worry I already know C++” and they’d have to find some way of verifying that skill set on their own.
Meanwhile, your competition who went to school can say “I got a 4.0 in all my fundamental accredited coursework and I was the front end designer for my group capstone project with 3 other students where we built a dog walking gig app, here’s how we worked together to make decisions and resolve issues…”
If the only thing that makes it a scam is the price…that’s a weak argument. And we have the statistics to show us that college degree holders still out-earn high school graduates greatly.
When we see the wealthy stop sending their kids to Wharton and Harvard then you know it’s a scam.
>without putting people in 100k of debt
This exists, and it's called "attending a state school."
You can cut the costs by roughly 50% more by going to community college for two years and transferring.
Apprenticeships are still around in the modern day -- including for white-collar jobs! Kelly Vedi writes a lot about this in her Substack: https://kellyvedi.substack.com/
Though dorms are probably the only time in your adult life all your friends are walking distance away and free to hang out.
There is a huge variation in quality of local colleges, and in opportunity that arises from them. As every reader here knows, Americans are super class-conscious and pretty competitive, so a good local school will seem like "settling". And, they're not free by any means.
Getting a bad degree from a cheap/bad public school seems like a bad life decision. There is so much more to gain by not getting tattoos and looking presentable instead of getting a degree from a school people don't respect
As a test, look in your IT department. I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of people from community colleges and lower ranked "cheap" colleges with engineering degrees. I like the idea of just going to the cheapest school but ranking unfortunately matters to a lot of employers, and ranking is usually correlated with cost.