2y ago

Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?

www.nytimes.com

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https://ghostarchive.org/archive/DV671

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I think a big part of it is the mindset that college education should train you to do a job, rather than provide a knowledge based on which job-specific training can be built upon. I think this is dually precipitated by employers not investing in training/educating their employees anymore, and outsourcing that cost to the employee, but also the issue of students who throw a fit about taking class X because they're going for a degree in Y (I see this a lot with science/engineering majors when having to take classes in the humanities).
- the issue of students who throw a fit about taking class X because they're going for a degree in Y (I see this a lot with science/engineering majors when having to take classes in the humanities).
  Yeah. That's really an ongoing issue that I've seen too. "Why do I have to take English Comp and some other art crap, when I'm studying CS?" Is something that I have heard a lot. And the reason is that context matters and humans are not rational actors so, it's important to learn about other ideas in order to both be able to effectively apply hard sciences in a world that doesn't always match up to what's on paper, understand why ethical standards exist, and know about the things that we humans do without clear material reason.
  I blame the neoliberal idea that everything must relate to profit and anything that isn't directly related to profit is luxury as a cause of this problem. Hard sciences are about understanding the world around and, to some degree inside, us. Arts and humanities are about what gives us joy, purpose, and interesting ways to make the world a weirder place.
  
  I'll be honest, I understand the college student's point of view because for the most part, the teachers in the geneds did not give two fucks about what they were teaching, and I had already learned enough that wasn't directly relevant to my interests when it was free. Like, seriously, I put up with over a decade of this palpable disinterest in K-12, now I'm paying for the privilege of taking more of it from adjuncts, because the college says I need to buy $20K worth of credits before I can talk to someone who's actually motivated?
  
  Engineering school for me was mostly about learning how to learn, getting some baseline knowledge to know what questions to ask or where to start looking for answers, and broadening my horizons. Those have a ton of value for me.
- As a current college student, I think a lot of this has to also do with teachers and our schools also having this mindset and even actually giving us basically job training. On the one hand it makes sense; If you're getting a degree in graphic design, you might as well learn Illustrator. But on the other hand, it communicates to, say, graphic design students that their degrees are "Illustrator Degrees" instead of "Graphic Design degrees." I don't want to generalize too broadly, but I've definitely seen it where if you give a student these types of classes, they start to disregard the theoretical or even the "knowledge base" classes in favor of "here's what you'll be doing in 2 years" classes.
- It is the age old argument. The question is why are you going. Unless your wealthy, it is nuts to spend money and take debt without a plan of how you will pay for it. Too many people do not consider the price value side of things.
  As far as the the tech versus liberal education. It makes no sense for someone like me to pay for or waste time on useless crap. What is useless crap is very person dependent. The other interesting thing is one never hears about the liberal education folks pushing that they need more science and tech skills. How many liberal arts people actually understand science and tech?
  
  I’m in medicine, and one of the biggest issues I see in my field, as well as science in general, is a lack of ethics and cultural understanding. The humanities give context for scientific findings, and guide us in the research process. Without it, we wind up with the Tuskegee trials or Nazi medicine. The same sort of things can happen in tech (privacy, security, wellbeing) and engineering (safety, integrity).
  Humanities aren’t a waste of money. They broaden your knowledge of our world and the people in it. Maybe you don’t have interest in art or history, but law, ethics (or other areas of philosophy), and sociology all can help a person be more well-rounded.
  
  A lot of people were also lied to about the cost analysis; there was a pervasive idea that everyone who went to college would get a 'good job' that would pay for all of the loans.
It's the fault of whomever decided that a college degree should cost as much as a house
- To be fair, the cost of the house and the cost of a degree could be equal but at like 3,000 dollars.
- A lot of public universities still aren't that expensive. It isn't something that someone can easily pay their way through anymore, but it's a far cry from what some private universities cost. I seriously don't get why people get saddled with insane debt for some of these mediocre private schools.
The people who charge $300 for textbooks are surprised people don't want to pay $300 for textbooks. Typical.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary These three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons and Ana Hernández Kent — used the Fed’s survey of thousands of American households to consider the financial advantage that college graduates receive.
Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business.
Douglas Webber, who was a professor at Temple University until he joined the Federal Reserve Board last year as a senior economist, has spent the last decade looking for new ways to calculate the value of a college degree.
What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill.
In July, the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman and David Deming helped illuminate exactly how that system works when they published the most recent in their series of research papers analyzing the intersections of social class and higher education.
More recently, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who served as the chief economist of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, with Tom Lee, a series of papers predicting an even greater shortage: 8.5 million missing American B.A.
Saved 94% of original text. :::

31 comments