The new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet
nytimes.comFrom 2010 opinion polls:
> Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college.
This is why, when we talk about student loan debt forgiveness, the condescending people who yell "You made a choice! You signed a contract!" are completely missing the reality. Every adult is pressuring these kids to go to college. Their own parents, their school teachers, potential employers, etc. The kids have been lectured practically from birth that they need to prepare to go to college. It's massive social conditioning, almost a religion.
Even if you go to college, you can choose between majoring in something that will give you job opportunities later on, versus a useless boutique major. Or you can choose to go to a state school, versus a private college. (That being said, I think the financial aid/loan practices of universities are predatory; we certainly shouldn't be rewarding the predation with a government bailout, though. Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy!)
There are a couple of issues here:
1) Nobody seems to ask the question, why do schools charge the same tuition for every major, even though the schools themselves know that the financial outcomes tend to be dramatically different for those majors?
We might even ask, why do schools offer "useless boutique" majors that aren't financially lucrative? Isn't that educational malpractice?
2) Let me ask you a serious question. I have my own ideas about this, but I want to hear yours without prejudice. Why do you think it is that students choose "a useless boutique major"? And why do you think it is that students choose to go to an expensive private college rather than a state school?
You might claim that these kids are just "dumb", but if you can get admitted to an expensive private college, then you're probably not dumb but rather quite smart. And let's also assume we're talking about "A" students in a "useless boutique major", so kids who apparently quite smart too.
Somewhere along the way the function of the schools changed. It seems like you are asking about the school as a vocational program but that wasn't always true. I have friend's whose parents still think universities should be a place for exploring and learning, not necessarily job training. But for many people that is no longer true.
My mom helped to make her program at the school she went to because she was studying thing that were interesting to her. That may not be feasible now and I'm not actually clear on quite how it worked, but I wouldn't say that was educational malpractice.
I went to a liberal arts college that allowed you to design you own degree. The process of design was half the degree itself. Whilst it make seem that "sociospatial analysis & design" is a useless boutique major, the attitudes of self-motivation, learning how to learn, and successfully exploring new areas of interest, inquiry and productivity have been essential to my career.
While I did use the specific skills and knowledge I learned in the process for a couple years, the underlying methodology of discovering needs, aligning interests, convincing others to support you, and developing new ideas and opportunities have been essential - even though I now do something totally unrelated to my degree.
Obviously I was both lucky and atypical, but the "useless vs. useful" distinction is not so black and white. Liberal arts universities _used_ to be about learning how to be a whole person in the world, of which gainful employment is an important part (but not the only goal).
Clearly the aristocratic origins of university education are out of step with the economic realities of today, but the DNA of the approach is arguably even more important to financial outcomes in the long run than just getting a degree in business or STEM.
The world is a mess and defaulting to a cookie cutter degree just because it will get you a vanilla, status-quo job out of the gates is not the kind of thing that will serve most people in the long run (IMHO).
> We might even ask, why do schools offer "useless boutique" majors that aren't financially lucrative?
- Ideology/institutional pressures/other nonfinancial factors (many of these universities are going bankrupt)
- They want to trap their students in debt forever
- Hoping for bailout from government or private donors
> Why do you think it is that students choose "a useless boutique major"?
My wording was too harsh. Not all non-lucrative majors are useless (though many are). Here are a few reasons:
- Ideology
- Really drawn to a particular field (ex. "starving artist" who doesn't care if they have to eat ramen every day, if that means they can practice their calling)
- Belief in the old ideal of a well-rounded education. Unfortunately, this ideal is getting less and less achievable, as universities become more expensive (explosion in number of administrators) and more ideological, even as the economy. class system is less and less able to support the social classes that traditionally valued this.
Perhaps some are interested in an easier way to achive the social status that an academic degree confares.
Others may be genuanly interested in philosophy or history or literature or ...
I am thankful for the second kind. Society that has all its culture stored in an LLM is not attractive to me.
So where is this magical list of majors that will give you a job? I studied computer science and did a pretty good job at it. No job prospects out of school. It's several years later and I'm only just getting going career wise. There isn't some easy path you can take where it all just works out.
Private school vs state school? It would have cost me the same either way. What's the difference then?
> Magical list of majors
BLS has a good start: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/home.htm
“Almost a religion” is apt. Higher education system as we know it started in the church.
As belief in god-kings wained, landed gentry sought to keep their kids from peasant work; kings decree a family was beyond such work was seen as unfair. The church was happy to accept payment for study in theology the illiterate were unable to falsify.
Then came bachelors, masters, PhD, to filter and gatekeep even further.
That’s a paraphrase of various historians perspectives anyway. Depends how reliable one finds them to be, I suppose.
Yeah, and they must have some personal responsibility to resist that pressure
One thing I never understood were people who paid money to go to an American university to major in a language like French, German, or Japanese.
Why don’t they just take their 60k a year tuition and spend it living in the country that actually speaks that language?
I’ve seen third or fourth year students majoring in French with worse language abilities than the engineering students who spent a semester on exchange to France or Switzerland.
Some majors are a complete waste of time and money.
You should think of the French department at a college as being analogous to the English department; they are literature departments and the professors are specialized in particular domains of literature and the coursework is centered on literature. e.g. see e.g. see this schedule of course requirements [0]. It requires just 1 year of advanced study in learning to speak and write the language itself, the rest is on reading, criticism, and specialized areas of French literature.
One could argue that learning about 17th century French drama makes this even more of a waste of time and money. Personally I think it's great that society has enough surplus wealth that people with a passion for particular topics can 'waste' their time in this way.
[0]: https://www.ohio.edu/cas/modern-languages/undergraduate/fren...
Maybe for French. But I doubt this is the case for more distant languages like Japanese and Russian.
Are American undergrads studying Tolstoy in Russian in the Russian department?
Getting a loan to attend a 4-year university is obscenely easy. Getting a loan or grant to visit a foreign country is difficult. However, if you want to visit a foreign country as an English teacher, having a 4 year degree in the native language of that country makes it MUCH easier.
Quote
Webber next considered the impact of a student’s major. If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip.
Knowing what I know now, if I were Gen Z I would definitely think twice about going to college, unless I was very passionate about a field which required a degree and paid well. I wouldn't go "for the experience". You can bum around in a van on a college campus for free
I would like to bridge year my kiddo in a trade like electrician or plumbing, then have him go to college (I'm assuming he's smart enough to make it worthwhile). But that's over a decade away, who effing knows what things will look like.
If I had money, I would purchase an HVAC installation/repair company. I would hire some senior certified folks whose main jobs is to teach/supervise. I then would hire a bunch of high school graduates to five year contracts. My pitch would be I will train you and pay your a fair wage but you promise you will work for me for five years.
If I was 18 again, I'd take a gap year slumming it in Europe or Asia before continuing with career stuff