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0 pointslinguae2y ago0 comments

Yes, more Americans are getting degrees now than in previous generations. However, if the cost of getting a college education continues to grow and if it becomes increasingly difficult to get a college education without taking on crippling levels of debt, then more people will choose not to go to college in order to avoid heavy debt burdens. This will mean fewer college-educated individuals.

The worst case scenario is that we return to the pre-GI Bill status quo, where generally only those from wealthy families could afford a college education unless they won scholarship money. There was a period from the late 1940s until roughly the 1980s or 1990s when college opportunities were extended to the middle class and the poor through the expansion of public university systems that offered low (or even no) tuition, extended merit- and need-based scholarships that are funded publicly and privately, and student loans. Tuition and other expenses were low enough to where it was possible for many students to cover some or all of these expenses by working a part-time job during the school year and/or by working full time in the summer, and for those who needed to take out student loans, debt levels were not crippling. But in the past few decades, the cost of college has risen to levels where working part-time during the school year and full-time during summers just doesn’t cover costs like it used to, and where people are graduating with increasingly burdensome student debt loads. The high cost of housing isn’t helping matters.

I see a few potential solutions:

- Price caps imposed by the federal government as a condition for accepting federal student aid, though this could mean cuts to services.

- Upstart colleges and universities forming that offer a reduced-cost college experience by being “no frills” and focusing on teaching without offering the wide array of services that even the most modest universities offer (e.g., no career centers, no well-equipped fitness centers, no luxury dorms, no on-campus health centers, etc.). However, some of these services may be mandated as part of accreditation standards, though I don’t know much about this.

- A concentrated effort to improve the nation’s K-12 education so that way high school graduates are equipped to perform a wide array of jobs that don’t require higher education, along with an effort by Corporate America to hire high school graduates for jobs that truly don’t require a university education.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

cman14442y ago

The article shows that the cost of going to college is not growing significantly though. Only the sticker price is growing, and Americans are not aware of (or just underappreciate) the significant value of a higher education.

Doesn't that mean that the main problem is a marketing/information issue, and less of an actual affordability one?

brnaftr3612y ago

I dunno man, I took the community college route, $2k/semester on average. If I was a traditional student I would've been eligible for free tuition on the basis of my ACT (27) score — I graduated with a 1.89 GPA. University is only $3k/sem, but I've managed to secure funding despite my mediocre college GPA. Assuming that continues my average tuition cost will likely dissipate to nothing.

While I was at the college I was living on my own, working full time for $15/h - entry level shit - and throughout that period I stayed close to breakeven with zero external funding and that's with a 1yr COVID-hiatus and relatively high food expenses.

University is a different, but nonetheless, similar story. Grants have magically become available to me transitioning from the poor-school to the university. I will say the property rates here are off the chain, similar to what I'd expect in an economically booming metropolitan. But that leads me to my point:

I can't tell you whether or not somebody from Yale or the University of Nebraska is going to get hired based on their school, however I'll go out on a limb and say that if the UN gal was even remotely prudent she'd be able to skate out with pretty minimal debt, if any.

A lot of people are chasing experiences and prestige, and those things cost money. Unfortunately, out-of-state charges are actually obscene. However there are programs that exist to except certain regions from those. Working to expand those and distribute the student population, I believe, would be generally more favorable than other interventions. Maybe I'm wrong, but the only thing that changed from college to university was the textbook publisher but more importantly - people doing the work we're supposedly being trained for in class.

Moving people around with economic incentives that will, I would presume, bolster the number of participants available on smaller campuses would do a lot to improve things all around. I've seen even modest labs put together some pretty impressive research.

And another nit to pick is that colleges very exclusively target fresh-outta-high school kids. And that is in and of itself pretty predatory, but more importantly it's putting half-baked people in a system they are not equipped to deal with, and with long-run non-trivial consequences if they fuck up - and there's quite a few ways to fuck up. And maybe that's orthogonal to my point above, but at least it would be an available option for those willing to scrutinize the risk/reward proposition, and maybe a basis for restricting funding to individuals.

I would expect a more mature population, on average, to be more diligent in every facet of their education, but especially when it comes to fiscal responsibility and the willingness to hold the system accountable - something which I've been made to do in a couple of instances, which I don't expect I would've done as a kid. My intuition tells me "they" don't want actual adults in, though. Kind of a liability seeing how all the shit works when you've been in the real world, unsheltered for a decade, and coming into the domain of a bunch of pretentious airheads that can't organize their head from their ass.

I dunno, that's my two cents.

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