Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents.

People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.

People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.

And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.

The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings.

And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.

Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.

Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.

Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko...

Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?

Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.

They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.

A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.

Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money.

Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.

My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.

I went to uni to learn to learn. It helped that it was free, but it was a rigorous education with formal proofs (starting in week 1), proper research, scientific writing etc. Very few people will learn that outside universities, and, while not strictly needed for most jobs, it really helps as a tool to shut 'talkers' up to this day. Socially it was good as well; got my first and second project for my tiny company I set up in uni from the father's of two study mates: the first project was 100k, the second 1.6m (both guilders at time), so there is that; I would have never known these people otherwise.

It seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane.

When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.

I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).

Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.

As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.

I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.

The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.

"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance.

One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.

Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.

The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."

I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.

Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.

But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.

Meanwhile, China is churning out STEM graduates at breakneck pace. Sure, not every single one is Nobel prize material, but 7 mainland China universities are now in Times' top 100, and another 5 Hong Kong ones as well.

I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.

There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.

But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.

The problem is that no one can really articulate what the point of higher education is.

If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.

If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.

If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?

If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.

Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.

No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.

[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...

Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class

The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund

The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.

Maybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..

They're wonderful but, yes, the cost is out of control.

Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.

Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? I can see why those in h1b’d industries like cs don’t see any point, and those are the industries where the most jobs and money have historically been. As goes the STEM labor market so goes the market for stuff like accounting, communications, sociology. A fair and secure labor market is a necessary condition for higher education to pay off. American workers compete for jobs with a global workforce, therefore American universities must be cost competitive with those in India, China, etc…. Tenure is like tarrifs, the cost of protectionism is paid by the consumer.

IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.

I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:

- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!

- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!

In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.

It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.

Because they are not. If I was 18 years old right now, I'd be going into a trade of some sort. No debt, immediately earning a decent amount of money. AI will push even more kids towards this route.

The 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness.

The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.

I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.

However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.

I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.

However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.

Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.

Almost nobody seem to see college as a place where people can develop the skills to learn itself? Did it get that bad?

It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.

It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.

My theory is public state schools will become much more prestigious, as non extremely rich kids will find spending $75k on tuition to just not be worth it when you can go to your local state flagship for a fraction of the price. Plus, most of the most prestigious schools in other countries are public schools (e.g. UT and UBC in Canada, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK).

As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.

Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.

It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.

When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.

This is worrisome. College experience does provide unique benefits compared to self-learning.

There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. The social environment can be replicated for free. You're not paying six figures for an education, you're paying six figures for exactly two things:

1. Someone to write lesson plans for you

2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process

Maybe one thing to keep in mind is that there are a big range of colleges in the US. If you go to a poorly regarded party school then probably you have a good time and maybe even get some useful connections out of it, but the main advantage is presumably being able to check the ‘college degree’ box when applying to relatively ordinary jobs. If you go to Harvard then (a) you pay much less if you have limited means and (b) your future prospects are probably significantly better from the experience (this is a bit complicated – a lot of the good outcomes are due to capable and ambitious inputs so the direct benefit of the degree is more limited).

It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).

When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.

Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.

Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.

My degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).

The question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime".

The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.

They're absolutely not, but I think 18 is also young to go into the workplace straight from school.

I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing.

We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.

No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.

Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.

Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.

The problem is that because lots of people have a degree now, employers have no problem finding candidates by requiring one.

So now, almost all white collar jobs require a degree. You may not ever be able to move into management without one either.

I graduated high school in 2005. I had been making and running websites and forums (phpbb anyone?) since 1998…ish?

I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere.

As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions.

I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.

1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?

In unrelated news: China graduates more engineers then ever before.