With AI heavily driving into knowledge jobs and the insane value extraction / rent seeking that’s going on in education in the US, that is not a surprise at all. It’s smart.
The NIH grants starting salary for a lab technician that needs a college degree is about 35k. They could make that at a fast food chain and not have 100k in student loans to start out their life with, it’s not hard to see why some might give up on college.
That would be the correct assessment given the return of college vs the cost. Unless you want to be a doctor/lawyer/dentist/engineer, college isn't really worth it.
and to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated.
80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market. I’m not anti-college because I think you find yourself there and learn a lot, but the math doesn’t make sense compared to just investing the money in my opinion. And 104k is the average.
>The average cost of attendance for a student living on campus at a public 4-year in-state institution is $26,027 per year or $104,108 over 4 years.
Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree, you wind up in a scenario where a nation wastes 4 years per generation only to wind up with the same economic landscape later. They'll cut these programs well before that happens. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
yeah, the government let a private corporation manage it, and they lobbied for laws to make sure their loans are un-defaultable. It's just free, guaranteed money for them.
And college isn't getting more expensive because of higher costs, it's getting more expensive because they can add a bunch of fancy amenties that are used as advertisement, even if it doesn't directly help with the education aspect. Even 10 years ago there were thousands of dollars of costs per semester on misc. fees that I couldn't opt out of. it was basically a tax from my school.
So yeah, the cost comes from somewhere, and both the funders and the beneficiaries have every incentive to bloat it.
> Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees.
Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth generated by that is squandered by a class of people, a society needs people to be educated to be able to innovate and generate new wealth.
If you are only thinking in financial terms there's no way for higher education to ever make sense in the long term, given that over time it slowly becomes the new status quo (as it's happening), and salaries won't ever continue to increase with higher education when there's a larger and larger share of the labour pool highly educated. It is still a net benefit to society to have highly educated people, there's more specialised labourers to draw from to transform ideas into wealth generation.
I don't think we should ever think of education in purely individual's finance terms, I gladly pay my taxes (in parts to fund education) in a country where I wasn't educated in because I know it benefits me in the end, more educated people helps to avoid economical stagnation.
It's not free lunch but giving everyone in a society an equal opportunity to achieve specialised education is a net positive in the long term, even if it costs a lot. The same with healthcare.
> With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree
That already happens in the USA even with education being as expensive it is, I don't believe it's a sound argument...
Given that the USA does not provide universally free education and still suffers from degree inflation requirements, no, I don't believe it's a sound argument that free education would make it worse. It will happen anyway, as it is happening in the USA, even if it costs a lot.
At least with free education everyone has the opportunity to attend it no matter your level of wealth or your financial outcomes from it.
That's not the argument I made though. The argument I made is that it isn't any better, isn't free, and as a further point, they'll do away with the free university programs when they cease to provide economic return because it's a mirage.
"Society benefits from having a highly educated population, "
Show your work here. Society also benefits from having electricians, plumbers, and garbage men.
Be sure to include how you would prove that graduating with a bachelor's degree indicates that the graduate is educated. From what I have seen, that ain't necessarily so.
And there I am, with my double degrees from a German Unibersity and not a single Euro in student debt... Instead of the average of student debt in the US, we have a mortgage on hous, and a house obviously. All that despite paying taxes, which also cover stuff like higher education.
Because do not forget, you pay taxes in the US as well. On top of your student loans and whatnot.
And no, Germany tried to cut tuition fees already. Those were abolished after, if memory serves well, a year or two.
Were there any restrictions on who could enter a German University? Because the requirements to get into a United States college or university are pretty lax.
> 80k invested at 18 and getting 10% returns like in the stock market is $1 million at age 45. At 65 it’s $7 million dollars. The math on college doesn’t even beat the stock market.
This isn't the alternative for most people. There isn't an option to get a mix of 80k in federal and non-federal students loans to throw into the stock market. The real question is, for most people, does it make sense to take on ~80k in student loans and go to school for 4-5 years, or should you try to immediately enter the job market.
Plus, expecting 10% real returns, year after year, in some chosen passive fund is unrealistic modeling.
No one said 10% real returns. It’s 10% counting inflation, which is the number I provided.
> The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index.
I don’t know why people are getting hung up on this 10%, it’s just the historic returns everyone in Boglehead and FI/RE communities uses. If you wanted to use the 6-7% real returns after inflation that is fine too. The numbers still are the same, you’ll just get an inflation adjusted number. You’ll need inflation adjusted numbers on your college earnings too though, I don’t think the “extra 1 million earned by a college grad” is inflation adjusted.
I get hung up because the last century was by far the best economic century for humans ever, and it seems reasonably likely that the next will not be as good growth wise.
That affects the value of a college degree as well, of course.
I believe there have been studies that show that graduates who are unlucky enough to be job searching during a one or two-year recession have a lifelong income deficit compared to those who don't
You usually don't have 80k lying around at 18, and nobody is going to loan you 80k to invest them (and even if they would, the interest would fundamentally change your calculation). And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off.
So this comparison doesn't really make much sense as those students simply don't have the money to invest in stocks instead. The opportunity costs here are the wages they could earn in the meantime.
> And 10% returns is rather optimistic, though the number I've seen most often in these kinds of calculations is 6-7%, so it's not that far off.
When we talk about compound interest it is way off. Also sustained growth of that magnitude - especially if we want it above inflation is very hard and has occurred in very rare circumstances.
10% is the total return, but you see 6-7% because that's the real growth after inflation, which assumes average inflation of around 2-4%.
So you're getting 10%, but in terms of actual, real, concrete gains it's more like 7%. Also remember that's the average so it's possible to see years of 5% and then a few of 14%.
The 7% number also looms large because at 7% a year you double your money in ~10.3 years; makes it easy to plan for 30+ year investment horizons.
I mean, if you are 18 and come into $80k, by all means invest? That hardly invalidates the value of college education, which is an option for most high school graduates.
One, those 80k need to come from somewhere. Also, if you manage to get 10% per year, consistently over 27 / 47 years, you should run your own investment fund. There, you gonna make your 7 million per year...
It's a shame that nobody seems to have understood the comparison you were making.
You can directly compare the value of investing money in education and the stock market. If you had $80,000 to invest at 18 you often would be better simply investing in the stock market.
Most people of course borrow the sums required which means the interest increases the monies owed as opposed to gains from investment earnings. And the monies borrowed are owed come what may, not even bankruptcy allows escape from the debt and accumulating interest.
even if I gave you the BOTD and assumed that the govt. simply gave every 18YO 80k to use as they see fit:
investing is an awful first thing to do unless you already have a job and stable life setup. Pretty much any sane financial planner will say
1. get your base costs covered
2. get an emergency savings
3. get a long term (3 months) savings
4. THEN you can invest
an 18YO trying to get their home situation put together will probably burn through a good portion just by renting out an apartment and getting the bare necessities. And ofc they need a few months to find what is probably a minimum wage job, which will probably not cover rent by itself.
If they can get over that huge hump, there won't be much left to invest (definitely not a 3 months savings).
College isn't generally worth it for engineering either, unless you really want to work for something government or government adjacent where there is an explicit requirement for a degree.
Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree, and software development is applicable to all engineering, with more and more of the "expertise" of other fields being moved into computer software.
You can't be a civil, mechanical, aerospace, marine, chemical, etc. engineer through software... Software is just a tool for engineering disciplines, not everyone wants to be writing software instead of designing and building physical things.
>You can't be a civil, mechanical, aerospace, marine, chemical, etc. engineer through software..
Civil is the oddball in that list, because of PE certification, but the rest you absolutely can.
Having a Masters in Aerospace Engineering and having switched to software later, 95% of the work that I did over the 10 years in aerospace involved software packages. 60% of it was matlab, either data processing or analysis, and 30% of it was CAD, which is essentially programming.
Knowing what I know now, if I wanted to get into Aerospace through software, I would work on open source projects for autopilot or some aerospace analysis software, teach myself CAD, and with that portfolio I would absolutely get hired entry level into the companies I worked at, and would learn all the same stuff I learned while working, and the total level of effort to do this would be less than going to a 4 year college. And the only cost would be a decent laptop that can run CAD software.
>Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree,
In a vacuum, yes. In reality, I'm not sure I would have gotten past courses in stuff like Systems, compilers, and networks without being able to poke at peers and professors alike in order to get my head around them. Maybe some curated masterclasses could do the same thing for cheaper ("hundreds" instead of thousands), but those are a much more recent phenomenon; certainly not something widely known nor available a decade ago when I started school.
It's also a matter of "you don't know what you dont know". There are all kinds of stories of prodigies who were tinkering with code since they were 10. Meanwhile, I'm a graphics engineer, and I didn't even know what DirectX was until my 2nd year of college. It's an affordance that is increasingly less of an option, but the ability to see and dabble in different domains really helped me shape what I enjoyed or didn't. Without that experimentation, I saw myself freshman year working as an Android app developer. That changed quickly.
I think this is a bit of a reductive -- and likely inaccurate -- approach, as university is (a) not seen by everybody as purely vocational training and (b) may have benefits that aren't as easily quantified.
For my part: I'm a high earner in a technical field who has a B.A. in English literature, despite having intended to major in computer science. My field of study helped me become more open-minded, improved my writing skills, and helped me to develop soft skills, all of which have been more helpful to my career than my technical skills (based on my own observations and feedback from peers and managers).
University can be a transformative experience if not treated as vocational training; but that's also a good argument for increased vocational training and less emphasis on attending university.
Should we expect people to study humanities? A lot of the best software is written by amateurs or hobbyists in their spare time. I'm sure there is plenty of experts on Greek tragedies just because they love it.
I don't understand why people confuse studying with getting a diploma.
You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany
This is a green heron since the issue at hand isn't "oh but you can study without a diploma", the issue is "you won't be taken seriously because you don't have credentials" e.g. piece of paper.
The credential is that they were able to pass their classes, hopefully with good grades. Many employers want to know that you are the type of person who succeeds, not that you know some specific thing. University has basically taken the place of apprenticeships because employers don't want to train incompetent people, so they make you show competence with a degree.
I think people are confusing two types of studying:
- Undergrad level: Reading stuff that other people have already summarized books/blogs/etc and digesting it a bit. These days you might not really need to go to school to do this.
- Grad level: "studying" as in researching. I'm not in the humanities but I'm assuming that becoming a leading expert in "Germany 300 years ago" is a lot easier when it's your full time job.
Most of the responses here seem to be assuming the first case, whereas the case that is "fundamentally impossible" without some support is the more nuanced synthesis you get from the second case. And in our current system, half the purpose of undergraduate classes is to subsidize the higher level research.
I don't mean to make value judgements on whether further synthesis of "Germany 300 years ago" is needed, but until we come up with a better system killing undergraduate courses in field X is also a huge blow to the research there.
Though I'm a little salty because my wife bought in to the lie that studying the humanities is what you do for a career, yet her acquaintances who "made it" mostly have low-paying but high prestige jobs and a spouse who covers the bills for what is, in effect, a hobby.
Wondering if social media is in part responsible. It seems you can make a lot of money as content creator, especially in NA. I don't understand or believe the COVID story.
> Extremely small percentage of those who are doing social media are actually making money.
Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine.
Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")
No. You need like 100000+ "fans"/regulars to live of your YouTube channel. So if a person follows 5 creators, 5 in 100 000 can live of that. We are talking piano tuner rarity here.
Fundamentally, college is about building skills and networking with people. Leveraging AI should be taught in all college curriculum since it is a power multiplier for everyone. This idea that AI is making college irrelevant is completely absurd to me.
There is no doubt that some people can succeed without the structure of a college institution, but many people do NOT. And not everyone knows the tricks for connecting with quality and knowledgeable people who are invested in your personal success. College provides a path for that.
I don't think it says anything negative about people who choose to follow a college degree path. Rather, it speaks to the talent of people who succeed without it. There are many paths to a good and useful education. I personally went to a university and got a degree. And I know 100% that I would not have succeeded without it. That's my personal story; I've met plenty of people who succeed outside of that. Not everyone is the same or can take the same paths.
Well, from the current state of things, those people don't succeed with the institution either, which is why all the fuss.
College is rather expensive for networking, rather time consuming and grueling if the education isn't the pitch. You say college is for the networking. That's not what the institutions are putting on the label.
>"As a kid, you always imagine college will be a life-changing experience, and that your freshman year is where you'll get a chance to discover yourself"
Well isn't that what happened exactly? He discovered that he wasn't really interested in studying computer science...
College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc.
For the other unregulated fields its unsurprising considering that the quality of education was questionable compared with just reading half a dozen good books.
> College is fine in fields where the careers are regulated and college is required i.e. engineering, medicine, law, accounting, etc.
Agree wholeheartedly !
If you're going to college to "study" a mickey-mouse degree, then frankly you're wasting your time and your money.
Mickey-mouse degrees can be readily taken care of through far more cost effective options: books, practical experience at home and apprenticeships/junior jobs.
Employers are not stupid either. If you think a mickey-mouse degree is going to magically make you more employable then you're going to be in for a surprise.
As a late millenial and college dropout, I have considered attending college part time, and I have enrolled in online degrees a few times. But I lose motivation every time, because every uni system seems to be stuck in the 2000s, and I have a better job than all my friends with degrees anyway. If I found the uni experience remotely enjoyable, I would surely pursue a degree.
I can't imagine what it is like doing a degree these days in say CS, when the wealth of information on Youtube is incredible, and you can self-pace and learn interesting stuff. Postgrad would still be a different story.
I find youtube content to be very lowest common denominator and just a difficult form to learn from. There's open source comp sci curriculum that compile various MooCs and free college courses though that I thought was phenomenal: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
I agree that Youtube is very low quality (or non-existent) for most CS topics. I used Youtube (and other sources) often went I studied CS in college, but it was a constant search for the source that covered concepts relevant to what I was studying.
Youtube has a plethora of videos on introductory CS concepts, things that would be covered in the first 2-3 courses. After that, it's still very much a desert.
Online degrees seem to focus on teaching materials that are cheap to obtain elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to have seminars led by someone qualified, but I guess the numbers don’t add up for this.
This lines up with my experience. In my case, the teaching materials were some PDFs with the typical content recycled from old textbooks. The price tag was hefty, which made it feel like a scam.
There should be pretty large differences per country here if the costs are the major driving factor. Universities can be much cheaper or even free in other countries compared to the US.
Lumping students of useless liberal arts "degrees" together with those on their way to becoming neurosurgeons, quants, investment bankers, lawyers or strategy consultants is a disgusting media default I can not comprehend. You CAN NOT lump those together for an average. Different planets. Different universes.
Besides that: Aren‘t colleges as full as ever? Any college has trouble to fill a new semester?
Old school "liberal arts" before 1970 was about processing information, finding bias, finding patterns, critical thinking... Very meta... It would be excellent preparation for profession where you deal with people and information (investment banking).
Liberal arts of current year has nothing to do with that.
> They're not as interested in the typical "college experience" — whiling away four years rooming with friends and drinking at frat parties.
They are, but college is not place to do that! People can not give a consent while drunk, at college you are definitely not getting away with it!
> And many students are no longer drawn by the traditional mission of a liberal-arts education: to foster critical thinking and informed discourse.
They are, but college is not place where liberal-arts education is! Last 4 years had shown that. Asking for evidence, or criticizing something, will get you in trouble at college!
> Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn.
Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not.
In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn, which is a lot bigger than I thought before I looked it up. The Fed published the stats in an article a few years ago that was trying to suggest college was becoming not worth it, but once I looked at the raw data, it convinced me the other way. (This article has its own misleading comparisons by using ratios and ignoring absolutes, for example suggesting someone who saves 5x their salary is less well off than someone else who saves 6x their salary even when the 5x person has twice the income.)
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted.
The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.
It’s not my statistic. It’s the Fed’s. They have a longer version of this report where they account for and try to calculate the causal value of college, which more or less does exactly what you’re suggesting. It’s in section III here: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
>Your statistic is even more misleading because in the non-graduates category you are lumping in people that couldn't make it to college even if they wanted.
As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked.
A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (who can own their own businesses and earn $250k+).
Yet when we're looking for a career for our kids, we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.
>we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.
because it can be hard to be honest about our loved ones. Everyone wants to say Bobby is a genius and can grow up to be president. But having a 2.3 GPA and no drive in life means getting through the first year of community college will be a challenge, at least a challenge for Bobby. There are core questions to answer before we keep pushing Bobbby down such a path but his support network may never ask those questions to begin with.
Meanwhile, Andy with a 4.0 GPA, nationally acclaimed talent, and mutliple top college acceptances has the world as his oyster. He could probably go to art school and have the drive to end up in a highly successful career, even if that type of schooling tends to end up as one of the worst ROI. OFC, Andy's support network may be pushing him to be a doctor or Lawyer so there's still issues there.
I've known electricians working in data centers that made more than I did -- as the data center manager. I was also in charge of service delivery and some ISP/networking functions.
But.
Dude was 1) union, 2) worked 6 days a week to make that cash, and 3) they were long, hard days. This was also in the big data center areas outside of DC (NoVA) and probably wouldn't be a thing in rural Indiana, or Outer Nowhere, NSW.
FWIW I also know a plumber who owns their own business and had several underlings and they were making well north of ~300k takehome doing mostly construction/new build plumbing work. But again, long, hard days.
Not really, that bottom third is the third who shouldn't go to college, and there are ways of knowing whether your child is in that bottom third before they spend $200,000 doing it.
the question is what will that bottom third earn without the college?
And I suppose some of that bottom third are not people who shouldn't go to college but perhaps people who pursued their dream in college only to graduate and found out that dream earns less than the average high school grad.
But sure, some percentage of people in that bottom third are the ones that should instead do some vocational education and pursue a career that does not require college.
So, why does that make it a valid comparison? What data backs up this claim about not considering college (as opposed to chose not to)? The bottom third of people who do go to college don’t fare as well as the rest, and probably considered dropping out.
It’s simply not valid to compare the bottom third of college grads to the top, middle, and bottom thirds of high school grads. They only did that so they could say the college group’s income was lower, which is only true if you leave out most college grads. If you compared the bottom third of high school graduates to all degree holders, the ratio you’d get would be stark, with the college grads earning multiples more than the subset high school group.
It is valid to do what @brobdingnagians suggested, and look at the medians of both groups.
The only people making a real decision are the people on the border. The valedictorian is always going to college and the lunkhead is not. The only useful analysis is the one in the middle.
Real lunkheads don’t graduate high school, they were already excluded. The argument you’re offering is at some level explaining why college grads earn more, and you’re suggesting it’s because they were better prepared for college, more likely to choose it, able to afford it, etc. That is true.
But your reasoning does not justify the comparison that was made in the article, nor does it explain why it’s valid. The statistic is comparing incomes for people who graduated college to people who graduated high school and not college. It doesn’t matter whether they made a “real” decision, whatever that means, or not. It doesn’t matter if some people didn’t consider college, or if some believed they couldn’t afford it, or if some chose not to go. The question the article posed is what is the financial outcome of going to college vs high school but not college, and for that it’s not okay to compare the bottom third of incomes of the college group to everyone else.
You’re rationalizing one of many ways to partition college grads. You’re failing to explain why it’s valid to choose a partition for one group and not the other. The article did not offer a reason to use the lower third of college grads.
If the useful analysis is in the middle, then why not compare the middle third of high school graduates to the middle third of college graduates? That would be valid, and it would show, accurately, that college graduates on average earn more. Comparing the bottom third of college graduates to all high school graduates is obviously choosing to lower the average income of the chosen college group. There is no evidence in the article that it was done to make the comparison more fair, it doesn’t appear to agree with your comments or share your reasons.
In case you missed it, I linked to a different version of the Fed’s report that spends a lot of time trying to tease apart some of the things you’re bringing up, but in a scientific and statistically valid way. They try to answer the tricky question of how much of the income premium of a college degree comes from the person, and how much is actually due to college. They are accounting for ability level, family income, family history of college attendance, race, and other factors that capture people’s ability to choose college, and separate their intrinsic skills from their education. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37464064
The middle third of high school grads are not a similar group of people to the middle third of college grads. It's the top third of HS grads and the bottom third of college grads that are comparable people (top in the sense of academic potential, not income potential).
Why do you believe that? And more importantly, where is the data to back it up? It’s more likely that the top third of high school grads are more capable than the bottom third of college grads. Regardless, the report I just linked to accounts for this.
A better comparison would be the median of both (not average); especially in the context of a young person deciding what their odds of improving their circumstances are by going to college. A quick search looks like median for bachelor's degree is significantly higher. But with declining real wages, there could be a perception that going to 4 years of debt could be a bad idea in the long run.
That would seem to indicate that the raw statistics aren't the reason Gen Z isn't going to college, but is either perception of earnings vs debt / time / effort, segmentation by the colleges the rich go to vs the middle class, or the reasoning is something completely unrelated to finances such as social perception of it.
Definite red flag any time there is an attempt to compare completely different people. Of course the down syndrome kids are going to struggle more in school and, for the same reason, also struggle more in the workplace. There is nothing to suggest that graduating from college will cure their down syndrome, however.
Since college attainment has risen over time, a better look is to see how incomes, adjusted for inflation, have increased over time. The spectrum of people observed over generations, while not totally perfect either, is more comparable. We have always had superstars and down syndrome kids.
If college graduates are making more money, more college graduates means we should see a rise in average incomes. It would appear that a 378% increase in educational attainment[1] since the 1960s brought a 17% increase in average incomes[2]. Maybe there is something to it.
But... We can also see that in the 90s, incomes actually went down as compared to the 1960s, despite still having a sizeably larger group of college graduates. This suggests that, on average, incomes are as good as stagnant and that college graduates are not earning more than they would have had they not gone to college.
> it would appear that a 378% increase in educational attainment[1] since the 1960s brought a 17% increase in average incomes[2]. Maybe there is something to it.
Your 2nd source is not really average incomes, because it intentionally does not include many of the educated - this is what “production and non-supervisory” employees means.
Yeah, I don't love it, but it's what I found.
Strangely, it is not plastered over every "Is college worth it?" article. You'd think it would be right up front and center.
Median income is much more readily available, but not so useful here as the median person still does not have a college degree. That said, it could possibly stand in to help control for income gains seen unrelated to college.
"""
When the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.
The data for Black families showed the same pattern, but with an even more pronounced downturn. As with the white graduates, older Black college grads were enjoying sizable wealth advantages over their less-educated peers, with generally two or three times the assets of comparable Black high school grads. But Black college graduates born after 1980 were experiencing almost no wealth premium at all. In fact, the researchers found that the wealth premium for Black grads disappeared even earlier than it did for the white graduates. Black college graduates born in the 1970s weren’t receiving any substantial wealth benefit, either, only those born in the 1960s and earlier. Latino families followed a similar pattern. If they were headed by someone born after 1980, they had accumulated no significant additional resources beyond those of a comparable family headed by a high school graduate.
Yeah this effect of wealth premium going down could be due to the rapid rise of college costs. It has gone up faster than inflation for a long time.
The wealth premium is the part I was referring to about this being somewhat misleading, IMO. They calculate wealth premium in terms of a ratio of savings at retirement to yearly salary. They show plots of the wealth premium trending down and saying that savings with a degree are soon to be not better of than savings without. However, this hides the fact that the degree holders have 2x the savings in absolute dollars compared to non-degree holders when the wealth premium is “zero” (because the degree holders have 2x the income).
The correlation is there, but do we know this is causation in the implied direction? It seems to me that anyone who comes from an upper-middle class educated family would actually make a lot more by not going to college.
In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn
The other number you have to consider is how many of the people that start university end up with a diploma. Also not all diplomats and schools are created equally. While the avg. might 2x that is no doubt skewed heavily by people with the 'right' diploma from the right 'university'. If I can only get into a 'bad' university and I'm not 100% sure I will graduate, it is not at all sure that it makes financial sense for me to go.
Does that study cover what their parents were worth before they decided to go into higher education or not? Some families can't afford for their kids to leave home —they might be carers, they might have jobs— even before you consider $100k of debt.
If it's really just richer people in, richer people out, it's hardly surprising the median salaries are split.
I'm not questioning whether or not higher education has value, not even if it presents a good ROI, but I am suspicious of numbers that present nothing but race as the "background", when that is such an important part of who goes into higher ed.
>There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not.
if 33% of a "more educated population" is ending up worse than the less educated average, I'd say it's something to note. But I think the conclusion came out wrong.
on a micro level, it shouldn't affect if you go to college. But it should affect why and how you go to college. I didn't take this as "college isn't worth it full stop", I took it as "you can't just use college to 'find yourself' anymore". If you don't want to end up in that bottom third who probably switched majors, took breaks, or dropped out, you need a plan and to stick with it. You need to pick a diploma that has a good ROI instead of winging it with a more Artistic degree.
Or you know, you just need rich parents to supplement "the college experience". Let's never forget the elite aare insulated from the problems of the future working class.
> I took it as “you can’t just use college to ‘find yourself’ anymore
This FUD is exactly what I’m worried about. You took away a summary point that things are changing and somehow bad for degree earners, when in fact the bottom third of college grads have always been worse off, they’re the bottom third. College was never a guarantee of financial success. Of course some people can go into tech with only a high school diploma and earn more than someone with a degree who does social work or poetry or anthropology.
What does it say when you look at the stat that degrees earn 2x more than non-degrees, as a summary? To me it says that the dream of finding yourself in college is alive and well, that it’s not risky to go, if you have the means and the choice. To me it says the risk of not going is much higher than the risk of going. I agree with your point about choosing your major and sticking with your plan, if income is your goal, which is what most people try to do, I think. ~2x the income on average for 4 year degrees compared to high school is pretty big number, it surprised me, and it tells a different story than this article does. Before I read the Fed’s study I thought that college was maybe worth 15% more, on average (which would still be a nice boost…)
The Fed’s report calls the extra income that degree holders earn the “income premium”, and they even point out that the income premium is quite robust and not changing much, at the same time they’re arguing that the “wealth premium” is going down. They go so far as to ask “Why Has the College Income Premium Been More Durable than the Wealth Premium?” As far as the US Federal Reserve goes, there is no question and no debate about whether degree holders are earning more.
> Let’s never forget the elite are insulated from the problems of the future working class.
Sure, that is true. But with ~40% college degree attainment in the US, we are not talking about the upper class at all here, we’re talking about the middle class too, and talking about education that is available to most people.
>You took away a summary point that things are changing and somehow bad for degree earners, when in fact the bottom third of college grads have always been worse off, they’re the bottom third.
Sure, but when they were worse off they wasted maybe 10-20k on a degree. Lot of money down the drain, but you could pay that off working at a minimum wage job. Now it's more on the order of 5x those numbers, while spending power of minimum wage is down.
I didn't make that conclusion in a vacuum.
>What does it say when you look at the stat that degrees earn 2x more than non-degrees, as a summary
A general summary isn't a good idea on how to look at things, especially in a downturn. A general summary is that most "household's" average income is decent. But that's not who minimum wage is for, and also clouds the fact in the details that "households" have become more and more dual-income. Even if we didn't, we shouldn't ignore the 8% homelessness (random statistic, substitute it with the real govt statistic) and 20% minimum wage earners because the median is doing fine.
Fair points. College is more expensive, and has been growing faster than inflation for decades, no question about it. Looks like avg. cost of attendance for a 4 year degree at a state school is 80-90k. I don’t know how many people get financial assistance, or how many experienced loan forgiveness. I do think the U.S. could afford to pay for college outright based on the fact that degree holders earn more, and thus pay more taxes. The lifetime taxes for this group exceeds the cost of college.
> 8% homelessness
FWIW, homelessness in the U.S. is currently about 0.18%
Yeah I absolutely agree. There will always be crazy expensive anything and education is no different. but for state institutions they shouldn't be beholden to the same trend chasing that a private school does. Especially when all those fancy amenities are partially coming out of taxpayer money to begin with. What are we paying for if they can take that money and still increase costs to new students?
> Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison.
I don't think so. It's still a 1 in 3 chance of earning less with a college degree than without. It's useful to show how much overlap there is.
You could also argue that the bottom third of college graduates might also be the bottom earners without a degree, but at some point, you have to work with the real numbers that you do have, instead of hypotheticals.
To improve the article, one could have plotted the income distributions, so that readers can draw their own conclusion about risks.
It would be fine if they had summarized it as a minority 1/3 chance of earning less. It would be fine if they had compared the overall averages, where college grads earn more, and then compared the bottom third of college grads. But the story is trying to justify a summary point suggesting that college isn’t worth it, which justifies the title that Gen Z is giving up on college. The issue is that they didn’t point out that outcomes for college grads on average are quite a bit better, and that it’s only a minority of the time that things don’t work out as well for degree holders (and always has been only a minority of the time.) They didn’t explore the reasons behind the bottom third’s performance, and the comparison is more misleading than the parts I pointed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468176
It's even worse than that - $44,356 is the median salary for high school graduates aged 25 or over with a full-time job (it's extrapolated from the median weekly wage of $853) in 2022:
It's unclear exactly what qualifications apply to "a third of students earn less than $40,000" - I was not able locate an actual source for this claim - but the way it's written, it appears to include everyone, possibly even those that are not in the workforce at all. Also, given a huge increase in nominal income over the past couple years, it's difficult to evaluate this claim without a clear sense of what time frame this covers.
It's also unreasonable to compare college graduates 4 years after graduation to a cohort that includes mid-career professionals decades into their career. Consider for instance, how much doctors tend to make 4 years after graduating from college and how unrepresentative that would be of their full career earning potential.
It’s pretty bad, right? Is it possible for this to be an accident on the part of the author? I don’t see how. It seems like a clear case of bending over backwards to distort the data to tell a summary story that is opposite from the truth. This intentionally misleading comparison undermines the entire article, to me. I’m curious about why they’re trying so hard to spin the yarn that college isn’t worth it, when the data they had to look through in order to write this story demonstrates a somewhat different narrative.
Impressionable students believe they can go to college, do little to no work actually comprehending the material they’re going to be using in their field of choice, and then go all “shocked pikachu” when they graduate and are unemployable.
It’s not a college problem. It’s a student problem. They believe just because they have a degree that they’re entitled to high paying jobs when a degree isn’t that special anymore.
I like the phrase ‘shocked pikachu’, I’m definitely borrowing that some time. ;)
Yeah it could be that expectations have gotten lazy. It was always the case that you get out what you put in, so if people are coasting more, then outcomes probably reflect that.
The Fed’s paper does say that the income premium for college degree remains relatively robust, as it always has. The part that they call out as changing over time is the relative savings the college educated have by the time they retire. They don’t know why though, and spending and savings habits might be changing, so the wealth premium going down might not indicate that college is less special.
It's a real shame that cost has significantly outweighed the value derived from high education.
It's in the interest of business to continue to add value and explore new territory. Unfortunately though this has metastasized in higher education to producing junk degrees and programs that simply do not warrant costly or even sometimes formal training.
High education has evolved from something accessible only by the elite, or the brightest (elevated on the dime of the elite) to an overpriced commodity that yields little returns. Especially in undergrad, is the cost really worth it to achieve a basic level of competency that employers then have to build on significantly after the fact?
My advice to young people in my home country (not USA) is only go if the profession you want requires it. And I'll often help them to do a cost-benefit-analysis to work out if college is the right path.
The primary interests of business are primarily making money. When capitalism works at it's best, the innovation and exploring of new territory is the mechanism by which companies gain an edge in the market. Unfortunately there are other, less useful ways of gaining market advantage (monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture etc). It's a problem of corruption. To quote Bill Burr - "The president makes 400 grand a year. He's supposed to keep billionaires in line?"
That's what happens when you keep telling a whole generation that it's their fault for having accumulated large amounts of debt, that they should have just chosen a "productive" degree and not something "useless" like Litterature or History.
Gen Z is meant to be a productive generation, not an educated one. To hell with concepts such as upstanding citizens, as long as they are obedient at work :)
Maybe there's another part that leads to this. The world is rapidly growing in complexity, so people may not know exactly what to do after finishing high school. Anecdotally, I found that to be the case in germany.
We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said this was very uncommon in their time, usually due to financial considerations.
I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US. You get to pick once and if you pick wrong, it's worse than not going to college at all.
Any other input on that? Mine is purely anecdotal and I didn't find any hard data to support or disprove my theory.
Majority of plumbing work (which also pays well) is still just fixing legacy pipework from old building that's decaying and needing repairs or replacements, not installing the latest heat-pump powered 'Butt-Squirter 2000', which still uses the same plumbing concepts of the last 100 years.
Does it? Last time I had major plumbing work done, a guy showed up in a very nice car (he no doubt earned very well) looked at what needed to be done and gave us quote. The two guys who barely spoke English and where on site 8-10 hours a day for a week actually doing the actual work probably earned considerably less.
>The two guys who barely spoke English and where on site 8-10 hours a day for a week actually doing the actual work probably earned considerably less.
US might be a different beast.
I live in western Europe where qualified plumbers earn well because it's a credentialed job and labor exploitation of migrants in credentialed Jobs is less of an issue (but still does happen). You can't just hire some migrants off the street and send them off to do plumbing for you.
A plumber in Denmark can sometimes earn more than a SW developer.
> Majority of plumbing work (which also pays well) is still just fixing legacy pipework from old building that's decaying and needing repairs or replacements, not installing the latest heat-pump powered 'Butt-Squirter 2000', which still uses the same plumbing concepts of the last 100 years.
This describes software engineering as well, it is just that this site is biased towards people building new stuff rather than engineers who do maintenance work!
FWIW the plumbers I know live in nice custom houses and enjoy learning about new things all the time.
Even tech, software and hardware, unless you develop said tech, the use for said tech didn't really change fundamentally since social media came around. And that arguably only affected media and advertizing. What is posing problems now is the necessary transition from our old "system" (Western OEMs using Asian suppliers and burning fossil fuels, to oversimplify it) to something different (politically, socially, economically and technologically). Seems somewhere between 25 and just shy of 50 percent of any given population have serious problems accepting and adapting to that.
But then the western europe governments policy of porous borders and Gastarbeiter imports make sure that there can never really be a shortage of semi skilled labor so it is not clear if those trades can bring you to the middle class
If you can't afford a house anymore because it got too expensive, then sorry mate, you're out of luck, that's the fair price of the "free market" supply/demand. Nothing we can do about it, try being less poor next time.
But if a company can't find cheap labor for the price it's willing to pay (aka labor shortage), then they can import as many workers as possible with the help of the government, until the price of labor comes down to the level they deem "fair".
In Germany you also have the issue of an increased number of studies to choose from, roughly 15 years ago you had some specialozation added on top of your general studies. Now some of those are standalone studies.
Switching once is totally fine, after all you only what a given field looks like once you started. Maybe even twice. But by then one should now which field and degree to pursue.
I talked about mid-studies, preferably early so. Mid-career is harder, but doable. It largly depends on your field of study and experience. The more you are working at the interface between disciplines / industries / technologies, the easier it to switch between those. That's a career choice so, you can try to be more generalistic, and make career switches easier, or become specialized. Both are valod choices.
That is one reason why I think education should be as generic as possible, if you already specialize a lot durong your studies, being young and having zero job exoerience, carries the risk of making your career a bit harder.
I moved from the US to Europe (first Ireland, now Netherlands) and one thing I really, really miss is junior colleges. Sure there's a few post-leaving-cert or adult education classes but in California I could just go to www.smc.edu/, sign up for stuff that looked interesting (Android dev, Assembly, and German in the last semester I was there for reference), pay nominal tuition and keep my career going, and go lean cool stuff. Want to learn welding, calculus, and philosophy this year? Knock yourself out! There was no pressure to build towards a degree and the mix of students was broad.
That sounds great and much more like the concept that a university should be than what we have in Germany. I couldn't deviate from my courses in the slightest way, even when they didn't make any sense: mathematical logic held by a linguist because no one else was available. Wanted to take statistics, which would be highly relevant, instead? Well, you can't.
I went to a university in my country (Nordic country) at the end of the 90s. At that time you could actually just sign up to anything you wanted. You could follow a course in database theory at the same time as a course in ancient Greek history. If you wanted a specific degree (like "system development") you were free to compose your own plan, so long as they met certain requirements
I know several people who took a class out of curiosity and changed their career when they found their true calling. One effect of this was that you got a much broader set of people than the typical "nerdy guy". CS stole a lot of people who originally intended to focus on studies like sociology, law, economics, psychology and philosophy, but fell in love with CS. It was also much easier to combine work and studies when you could register for classes without committing to a full 3/5 year program.
Today, the same university focus on full time students who "bind" themselves to a specific program. I feel bad for the students today who are forced to follow a much more strict program. They still have some freedom, but it's much more limited and it's harder to "cross over" if you want to follow a class that belongs to a different program. I'm not surprised that many decide to drop out.
I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US.
The one interesting 'feature' of US education is that you don't really pick a subject before the 2nd or even 3rd year. It is quite possible (and common) to spend the first 2 years studying much a wider variety of subjects than you would at most European universities and then spending your final 2 years really focusing in on what you decide to be your core are of focus.
I'm almost finnishing my bachelors in software engineering.
I really wish I didn't have to waste all these years in university. I could've learned much more by self study. the traditional teaching system which is centuries old, is very bad and backwards. we have advanced in every aspect, we are reaching new milestones everyday, but our education system hasn't changed much from the start of time. this is awful.
I studied software engineering in university and it wasn't ideal but it gave me the most important stuff: the learning system and almost complete overview of software and hardware development used in computer science jobs.
Most people who do self-study only learn a very small subset of this knowledge - one or two programming languages and frameworks and maybe a little bit of algorithms.
My perspective of university has also degraded with time. I do not think it only has to do with the generation but with the universities themselves.
A bit of context: I undertook my 1st undergraduate program from 2007 to 2011, did an erasmus on 2010-2011, masters on 2013-2014 and Phd from 214 to 2017.
When I started at 2007 (in Spain), there was a lot of freedom. No need to go to lesson (only certain labs were compulsory), most of the the courses will not have any compulsory hand in course works. For 95% of my courses was enough to sit for the exam and pass it. Exams were difficult, rarely less than 2h and always 'unseen' problems. Failing was an option and we all experience it. You could always enroll again and try the year after. Another thing I had rarely experience afterwards, lecturer will treat you as an adult. They will talk to you as an adult, give you the freedom and expect you to behave as one.
All these freedoms allow us to learn about ourselves, do you really enjoy the topics? Do you need to spend 3h a week listening to the teacher or are you better off dealing with a different subject? Do you need 1 week to prepare for an exam or rather 9 months?
Making failure an option helped maintaining a high standard on learning outcome. There was no need to lower the bar so everyone could pass.
Also getting fees were nearly null and there were plenty of scholarships. The idea was something like everyone should have the opportunity to go to university, but only those who were ready could obtain a degree.
Later on, as I explored universities in other countries I felt it was more like, you can pay us X$ for Y years and at the end you get a shiny diploma.
Then as I shifted into software engineering, I found all the resources I needed were online. That together with the fact that universities tend to be slow to introduce new material and shift content, plus the high costs, plus the little freedom they provide, plus the focus they have on money, make universities loose appeal.
In terms of education, they're right. Unis became a relic in terms of giving up to date knowledge compared to the ""open"" market. What they chase is headcount and research funds, entangled in medieval rulesets and personnel with lifelong tenure (either by law or politics) who have little incentive to change. Few fields remain where they are unavoidable, like law or medical studies.
In terms of social life, experiences, my heart breaks for them to miss this. Merely just the setting of getting off the chains of parents, while still not having to (that much) worry about finances and and just visiting lectures that interest you gives you a whole different scope of thinking.
Attending university was extremely valuable to me: I got to escape my parents, hang out with other people of compatible interests, experience broadband for the first time, and best of all, meet my wife.
Oh, and employers sometimes filter on 'has degree' vs 'no degree' when selecting who to interview. It hasn't seemed to matter that my degree (music, specifically music performance) was completely irrelevant to my chosen line of work, and has contributed nothing to my career. I should've just skipped class.
It's hard to gauge what point you're making. You supposedly paid for class, if you could've skipped class and gotten all the benefit you got from it, did college give you the benefit, or was it just getting out in the world and being around people your age?
I'm saying that my life as I know it would be dramatically different, and probably worse, had I not gone to university, but all of the benefits I assign to having gone are peripheral (friends, spouse, weak employability marker) rather than direct (I learned something in class, related to my area of focus, that I was able to apply to my benefit in life). So it was worth going, but not because of The Great Education I Got There.
Young people are more attuned to where the wind is blowing, in part because they are part of the force that drives it, but generally because they're still learning how to navigate the world and don't have the privilege of not paying attention.
You can get any book online for free. Any research paper. Any textbook. Any information you like that is known to more than a couple of people. You can even get almost all MIT coursework free, they give it to you. You. can get a full education watching videos and reading books online, for free. Illegal or no, if you are in it for the education and not for the credential you don't have to pay anyone for it anymore. As long as the internet exists this is a fact of life. Another fact of life is that only middling people get paid for credentials, the big bucks are earned by people that know what they're talking about and have some expertise. You need a credential to be mediocre, you need to excel at something to be excellent, and anybody that recognizes excellence doesn't need a piece of paper to confirm it.
The rent seeking information brokers are all very mad about this of course. From news media to education to publishing, they're all clamoring something be done about it. But nothing can be done about it. They'll sell you the "college experience", the "need to stay informed", they'll guilt you, they'll try to scare you, but at best it buys them a little time. Nothing holds back the tide and their days are numbered as powerful institutions in our society.
The education isn't the point of college though. Employers are more interested in the credentialism than the education for the vast majority of jobs. Even in software engineering which works hard to avoid credentialism via leetcode and the like it's quite important. It's difficult to even get an interview at many(most?) firms without the degree.
Yeah, and part of what I'm saying is, if credential is more important for a job that capability then it's inefficient additional overhead, unless credential actually proves capability such as with CS or engineering, or medical school for now. With the rise of free education these credentials will go the way of the dinosaur and these institutions that rely on it aren't going to last unless they adapt to the new landscape, which I don't see how they can. Research institutions maybe?
The point of the credential is to show that you're the type of person who can succeed in a tough environment. Whether doing well in undergrad actually shows that you can succeed in the face of adversity is up for debate, but that's the main point of the diploma for most majors and it's not clear to me how you would replace it.
In fields that aren't based on hard knowledge credentialism is even more important as it's less clear what to test for in interviews.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadand to those saying an average college grad makes 1M more per lifetime than a HS grad, that included people who went to college when it was worth it. we need to look at the expected earning of someone joining now, but this as expected, can't be calculated.
>The average cost of attendance for a student living on campus at a public 4-year in-state institution is $26,027 per year or $104,108 over 4 years.
You should start a fund!!
Look, the cost comes from somewhere. You earn it later and pay it later, in taxes or in loan service payments. Either way, you pay it. At least with a loan you have a shot at being done paying one day. And this sort of thing only makes sense as a nation managing a treasury if the people go on to make significantly more from their degrees. With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree, you wind up in a scenario where a nation wastes 4 years per generation only to wind up with the same economic landscape later. They'll cut these programs well before that happens. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
yeah, the government let a private corporation manage it, and they lobbied for laws to make sure their loans are un-defaultable. It's just free, guaranteed money for them.
And college isn't getting more expensive because of higher costs, it's getting more expensive because they can add a bunch of fancy amenties that are used as advertisement, even if it doesn't directly help with the education aspect. Even 10 years ago there were thousands of dollars of costs per semester on misc. fees that I couldn't opt out of. it was basically a tax from my school.
So yeah, the cost comes from somewhere, and both the funders and the beneficiaries have every incentive to bloat it.
Society benefits from having a highly educated population, even if wealth generated by that is squandered by a class of people, a society needs people to be educated to be able to innovate and generate new wealth.
If you are only thinking in financial terms there's no way for higher education to ever make sense in the long term, given that over time it slowly becomes the new status quo (as it's happening), and salaries won't ever continue to increase with higher education when there's a larger and larger share of the labour pool highly educated. It is still a net benefit to society to have highly educated people, there's more specialised labourers to draw from to transform ideas into wealth generation.
I don't think we should ever think of education in purely individual's finance terms, I gladly pay my taxes (in parts to fund education) in a country where I wasn't educated in because I know it benefits me in the end, more educated people helps to avoid economical stagnation.
It's not free lunch but giving everyone in a society an equal opportunity to achieve specialised education is a net positive in the long term, even if it costs a lot. The same with healthcare.
> With the way education is going, credentials no longer guarantee good pay, and if everyone can go "for free" then every job will require a degree
That already happens in the USA even with education being as expensive it is, I don't believe it's a sound argument...
At least with free education everyone has the opportunity to attend it no matter your level of wealth or your financial outcomes from it.
Show your work here. Society also benefits from having electricians, plumbers, and garbage men.
Be sure to include how you would prove that graduating with a bachelor's degree indicates that the graduate is educated. From what I have seen, that ain't necessarily so.
Because do not forget, you pay taxes in the US as well. On top of your student loans and whatnot.
And no, Germany tried to cut tuition fees already. Those were abolished after, if memory serves well, a year or two.
This isn't the alternative for most people. There isn't an option to get a mix of 80k in federal and non-federal students loans to throw into the stock market. The real question is, for most people, does it make sense to take on ~80k in student loans and go to school for 4-5 years, or should you try to immediately enter the job market.
Plus, expecting 10% real returns, year after year, in some chosen passive fund is unrealistic modeling.
> The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index.
I don’t know why people are getting hung up on this 10%, it’s just the historic returns everyone in Boglehead and FI/RE communities uses. If you wanted to use the 6-7% real returns after inflation that is fine too. The numbers still are the same, you’ll just get an inflation adjusted number. You’ll need inflation adjusted numbers on your college earnings too though, I don’t think the “extra 1 million earned by a college grad” is inflation adjusted.
I believe there have been studies that show that graduates who are unlucky enough to be job searching during a one or two-year recession have a lifelong income deficit compared to those who don't
So this comparison doesn't really make much sense as those students simply don't have the money to invest in stocks instead. The opportunity costs here are the wages they could earn in the meantime.
When we talk about compound interest it is way off. Also sustained growth of that magnitude - especially if we want it above inflation is very hard and has occurred in very rare circumstances.
>The average stock market return is about 10% per year for nearly the last century, as measured by the S&P 500 index.
So you're getting 10%, but in terms of actual, real, concrete gains it's more like 7%. Also remember that's the average so it's possible to see years of 5% and then a few of 14%.
The 7% number also looms large because at 7% a year you double your money in ~10.3 years; makes it easy to plan for 30+ year investment horizons.
You can directly compare the value of investing money in education and the stock market. If you had $80,000 to invest at 18 you often would be better simply investing in the stock market.
Most people of course borrow the sums required which means the interest increases the monies owed as opposed to gains from investment earnings. And the monies borrowed are owed come what may, not even bankruptcy allows escape from the debt and accumulating interest.
investing is an awful first thing to do unless you already have a job and stable life setup. Pretty much any sane financial planner will say
1. get your base costs covered 2. get an emergency savings 3. get a long term (3 months) savings 4. THEN you can invest
an 18YO trying to get their home situation put together will probably burn through a good portion just by renting out an apartment and getting the bare necessities. And ofc they need a few months to find what is probably a minimum wage job, which will probably not cover rent by itself.
If they can get over that huge hump, there won't be much left to invest (definitely not a 3 months savings).
College isn't generally worth it for engineering either, unless you really want to work for something government or government adjacent where there is an explicit requirement for a degree.
Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree, and software development is applicable to all engineering, with more and more of the "expertise" of other fields being moved into computer software.
Civil is the oddball in that list, because of PE certification, but the rest you absolutely can.
Having a Masters in Aerospace Engineering and having switched to software later, 95% of the work that I did over the 10 years in aerospace involved software packages. 60% of it was matlab, either data processing or analysis, and 30% of it was CAD, which is essentially programming.
Knowing what I know now, if I wanted to get into Aerospace through software, I would work on open source projects for autopilot or some aerospace analysis software, teach myself CAD, and with that portfolio I would absolutely get hired entry level into the companies I worked at, and would learn all the same stuff I learned while working, and the total level of effort to do this would be less than going to a 4 year college. And the only cost would be a decent laptop that can run CAD software.
In a vacuum, yes. In reality, I'm not sure I would have gotten past courses in stuff like Systems, compilers, and networks without being able to poke at peers and professors alike in order to get my head around them. Maybe some curated masterclasses could do the same thing for cheaper ("hundreds" instead of thousands), but those are a much more recent phenomenon; certainly not something widely known nor available a decade ago when I started school.
It's also a matter of "you don't know what you dont know". There are all kinds of stories of prodigies who were tinkering with code since they were 10. Meanwhile, I'm a graphics engineer, and I didn't even know what DirectX was until my 2nd year of college. It's an affordance that is increasingly less of an option, but the ability to see and dabble in different domains really helped me shape what I enjoyed or didn't. Without that experimentation, I saw myself freshman year working as an Android app developer. That changed quickly.
There's a lot of factors to take into account.
For my part: I'm a high earner in a technical field who has a B.A. in English literature, despite having intended to major in computer science. My field of study helped me become more open-minded, improved my writing skills, and helped me to develop soft skills, all of which have been more helpful to my career than my technical skills (based on my own observations and feedback from peers and managers).
University can be a transformative experience if not treated as vocational training; but that's also a good argument for increased vocational training and less emphasis on attending university.
You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany
- Undergrad level: Reading stuff that other people have already summarized books/blogs/etc and digesting it a bit. These days you might not really need to go to school to do this.
- Grad level: "studying" as in researching. I'm not in the humanities but I'm assuming that becoming a leading expert in "Germany 300 years ago" is a lot easier when it's your full time job.
Most of the responses here seem to be assuming the first case, whereas the case that is "fundamentally impossible" without some support is the more nuanced synthesis you get from the second case. And in our current system, half the purpose of undergraduate classes is to subsidize the higher level research.
I don't mean to make value judgements on whether further synthesis of "Germany 300 years ago" is needed, but until we come up with a better system killing undergraduate courses in field X is also a huge blow to the research there.
Though I'm a little salty because my wife bought in to the lie that studying the humanities is what you do for a career, yet her acquaintances who "made it" mostly have low-paying but high prestige jobs and a spouse who covers the bills for what is, in effect, a hobby.
Some people are just better at it, have better circumstances, work ethic, are more lucky or something like that. I stream on Twitch occasionally, as does one of my friends. Their channel has grown to being 3x the size of mine in months, whereas I've been occasionally streaming for over a year. Their earnings from that are also a multiple of mine.
Neither of us really have large communities, but some people will have 10 or 100 better growth than either of us, which is probably applicable to most types of content generation or platforms out there. Here's some info about Twitch from years ago, some interesting trends: https://sullygnome.com/articles/normalgrowthontwitch (many content creators will never really "make it big")
I don't think it says anything negative about people who choose to follow a college degree path. Rather, it speaks to the talent of people who succeed without it. There are many paths to a good and useful education. I personally went to a university and got a degree. And I know 100% that I would not have succeeded without it. That's my personal story; I've met plenty of people who succeed outside of that. Not everyone is the same or can take the same paths.
College is rather expensive for networking, rather time consuming and grueling if the education isn't the pitch. You say college is for the networking. That's not what the institutions are putting on the label.
Well isn't that what happened exactly? He discovered that he wasn't really interested in studying computer science...
Is this meant to illustrate he's ahead in some way?
For the other unregulated fields its unsurprising considering that the quality of education was questionable compared with just reading half a dozen good books.
Agree wholeheartedly !
If you're going to college to "study" a mickey-mouse degree, then frankly you're wasting your time and your money.
Mickey-mouse degrees can be readily taken care of through far more cost effective options: books, practical experience at home and apprenticeships/junior jobs.
Employers are not stupid either. If you think a mickey-mouse degree is going to magically make you more employable then you're going to be in for a surprise.
Youtube has a plethora of videos on introductory CS concepts, things that would be covered in the first 2-3 courses. After that, it's still very much a desert.
Besides that: Aren‘t colleges as full as ever? Any college has trouble to fill a new semester?
Liberal arts of current year has nothing to do with that.
They are, but college is not place to do that! People can not give a consent while drunk, at college you are definitely not getting away with it!
> And many students are no longer drawn by the traditional mission of a liberal-arts education: to foster critical thinking and informed discourse.
They are, but college is not place where liberal-arts education is! Last 4 years had shown that. Asking for evidence, or criticizing something, will get you in trouble at college!
Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. There is no good reason to compare the bottom third of graduates to the whole pool of non-graduates other than to try to justify a misleading comparison about graduates somehow earning less when they’re not.
In fact, diploma holders as a whole on average earn roughly 2x what non-graduates earn, which is a lot bigger than I thought before I looked it up. The Fed published the stats in an article a few years ago that was trying to suggest college was becoming not worth it, but once I looked at the raw data, it convinced me the other way. (This article has its own misleading comparisons by using ratios and ignoring absolutes, for example suggesting someone who saves 5x their salary is less well off than someone else who saves 6x their salary even when the 5x person has twice the income.) https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
The relevant comparison is graduates versus people that voluntarily skipped college even though they could get a degree if they chose so.
As someone who owns a business doing something I'm way overqualified for, this is something that's way too often overlooked.
A slightly-above-average Electrical Engineer (earning, say $150k pa) might be as competent as someone in the top 5-10% of Electricians (who can own their own businesses and earn $250k+).
Yet when we're looking for a career for our kids, we tend to compare averages rather than their personal outcomes.
because it can be hard to be honest about our loved ones. Everyone wants to say Bobby is a genius and can grow up to be president. But having a 2.3 GPA and no drive in life means getting through the first year of community college will be a challenge, at least a challenge for Bobby. There are core questions to answer before we keep pushing Bobbby down such a path but his support network may never ask those questions to begin with.
Meanwhile, Andy with a 4.0 GPA, nationally acclaimed talent, and mutliple top college acceptances has the world as his oyster. He could probably go to art school and have the drive to end up in a highly successful career, even if that type of schooling tends to end up as one of the worst ROI. OFC, Andy's support network may be pushing him to be a doctor or Lawyer so there's still issues there.
But.
Dude was 1) union, 2) worked 6 days a week to make that cash, and 3) they were long, hard days. This was also in the big data center areas outside of DC (NoVA) and probably wouldn't be a thing in rural Indiana, or Outer Nowhere, NSW.
FWIW I also know a plumber who owns their own business and had several underlings and they were making well north of ~300k takehome doing mostly construction/new build plumbing work. But again, long, hard days.
And I suppose some of that bottom third are not people who shouldn't go to college but perhaps people who pursued their dream in college only to graduate and found out that dream earns less than the average high school grad.
But sure, some percentage of people in that bottom third are the ones that should instead do some vocational education and pursue a career that does not require college.
It’s simply not valid to compare the bottom third of college grads to the top, middle, and bottom thirds of high school grads. They only did that so they could say the college group’s income was lower, which is only true if you leave out most college grads. If you compared the bottom third of high school graduates to all degree holders, the ratio you’d get would be stark, with the college grads earning multiples more than the subset high school group.
It is valid to do what @brobdingnagians suggested, and look at the medians of both groups.
But your reasoning does not justify the comparison that was made in the article, nor does it explain why it’s valid. The statistic is comparing incomes for people who graduated college to people who graduated high school and not college. It doesn’t matter whether they made a “real” decision, whatever that means, or not. It doesn’t matter if some people didn’t consider college, or if some believed they couldn’t afford it, or if some chose not to go. The question the article posed is what is the financial outcome of going to college vs high school but not college, and for that it’s not okay to compare the bottom third of incomes of the college group to everyone else.
You’re rationalizing one of many ways to partition college grads. You’re failing to explain why it’s valid to choose a partition for one group and not the other. The article did not offer a reason to use the lower third of college grads.
If the useful analysis is in the middle, then why not compare the middle third of high school graduates to the middle third of college graduates? That would be valid, and it would show, accurately, that college graduates on average earn more. Comparing the bottom third of college graduates to all high school graduates is obviously choosing to lower the average income of the chosen college group. There is no evidence in the article that it was done to make the comparison more fair, it doesn’t appear to agree with your comments or share your reasons.
In case you missed it, I linked to a different version of the Fed’s report that spends a lot of time trying to tease apart some of the things you’re bringing up, but in a scientific and statistically valid way. They try to answer the tricky question of how much of the income premium of a college degree comes from the person, and how much is actually due to college. They are accounting for ability level, family income, family history of college attendance, race, and other factors that capture people’s ability to choose college, and separate their intrinsic skills from their education. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37464064
That would seem to indicate that the raw statistics aren't the reason Gen Z isn't going to college, but is either perception of earnings vs debt / time / effort, segmentation by the colleges the rich go to vs the middle class, or the reasoning is something completely unrelated to finances such as social perception of it.
Since college attainment has risen over time, a better look is to see how incomes, adjusted for inflation, have increased over time. The spectrum of people observed over generations, while not totally perfect either, is more comparable. We have always had superstars and down syndrome kids.
If college graduates are making more money, more college graduates means we should see a rise in average incomes. It would appear that a 378% increase in educational attainment[1] since the 1960s brought a 17% increase in average incomes[2]. Maybe there is something to it.
But... We can also see that in the 90s, incomes actually went down as compared to the 1960s, despite still having a sizeably larger group of college graduates. This suggests that, on average, incomes are as good as stagnant and that college graduates are not earning more than they would have had they not gone to college.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...
[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/17679/real-wages-in-the-unite...
Your 2nd source is not really average incomes, because it intentionally does not include many of the educated - this is what “production and non-supervisory” employees means.
Median income is much more readily available, but not so useful here as the median person still does not have a college degree. That said, it could possibly stand in to help control for income gains seen unrelated to college.
""" When the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.
The data for Black families showed the same pattern, but with an even more pronounced downturn. As with the white graduates, older Black college grads were enjoying sizable wealth advantages over their less-educated peers, with generally two or three times the assets of comparable Black high school grads. But Black college graduates born after 1980 were experiencing almost no wealth premium at all. In fact, the researchers found that the wealth premium for Black grads disappeared even earlier than it did for the white graduates. Black college graduates born in the 1970s weren’t receiving any substantial wealth benefit, either, only those born in the 1960s and earlier. Latino families followed a similar pattern. If they were headed by someone born after 1980, they had accumulated no significant additional resources beyond those of a comparable family headed by a high school graduate.
"""
From https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-pr... - source paper is at https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
It make sense, I suppose, that in an efficient market the cost of college would rise to capture the return.
The wealth premium is the part I was referring to about this being somewhat misleading, IMO. They calculate wealth premium in terms of a ratio of savings at retirement to yearly salary. They show plots of the wealth premium trending down and saying that savings with a degree are soon to be not better of than savings without. However, this hides the fact that the degree holders have 2x the savings in absolute dollars compared to non-degree holders when the wealth premium is “zero” (because the degree holders have 2x the income).
The other number you have to consider is how many of the people that start university end up with a diploma. Also not all diplomats and schools are created equally. While the avg. might 2x that is no doubt skewed heavily by people with the 'right' diploma from the right 'university'. If I can only get into a 'bad' university and I'm not 100% sure I will graduate, it is not at all sure that it makes financial sense for me to go.
If it's really just richer people in, richer people out, it's hardly surprising the median salaries are split.
I'm not questioning whether or not higher education has value, not even if it presents a good ROI, but I am suspicious of numbers that present nothing but race as the "background", when that is such an important part of who goes into higher ed.
if 33% of a "more educated population" is ending up worse than the less educated average, I'd say it's something to note. But I think the conclusion came out wrong.
on a micro level, it shouldn't affect if you go to college. But it should affect why and how you go to college. I didn't take this as "college isn't worth it full stop", I took it as "you can't just use college to 'find yourself' anymore". If you don't want to end up in that bottom third who probably switched majors, took breaks, or dropped out, you need a plan and to stick with it. You need to pick a diploma that has a good ROI instead of winging it with a more Artistic degree.
Or you know, you just need rich parents to supplement "the college experience". Let's never forget the elite aare insulated from the problems of the future working class.
This FUD is exactly what I’m worried about. You took away a summary point that things are changing and somehow bad for degree earners, when in fact the bottom third of college grads have always been worse off, they’re the bottom third. College was never a guarantee of financial success. Of course some people can go into tech with only a high school diploma and earn more than someone with a degree who does social work or poetry or anthropology.
What does it say when you look at the stat that degrees earn 2x more than non-degrees, as a summary? To me it says that the dream of finding yourself in college is alive and well, that it’s not risky to go, if you have the means and the choice. To me it says the risk of not going is much higher than the risk of going. I agree with your point about choosing your major and sticking with your plan, if income is your goal, which is what most people try to do, I think. ~2x the income on average for 4 year degrees compared to high school is pretty big number, it surprised me, and it tells a different story than this article does. Before I read the Fed’s study I thought that college was maybe worth 15% more, on average (which would still be a nice boost…)
The Fed’s report calls the extra income that degree holders earn the “income premium”, and they even point out that the income premium is quite robust and not changing much, at the same time they’re arguing that the “wealth premium” is going down. They go so far as to ask “Why Has the College Income Premium Been More Durable than the Wealth Premium?” As far as the US Federal Reserve goes, there is no question and no debate about whether degree holders are earning more.
> Let’s never forget the elite are insulated from the problems of the future working class.
Sure, that is true. But with ~40% college degree attainment in the US, we are not talking about the upper class at all here, we’re talking about the middle class too, and talking about education that is available to most people.
Sure, but when they were worse off they wasted maybe 10-20k on a degree. Lot of money down the drain, but you could pay that off working at a minimum wage job. Now it's more on the order of 5x those numbers, while spending power of minimum wage is down.
I didn't make that conclusion in a vacuum.
>What does it say when you look at the stat that degrees earn 2x more than non-degrees, as a summary
A general summary isn't a good idea on how to look at things, especially in a downturn. A general summary is that most "household's" average income is decent. But that's not who minimum wage is for, and also clouds the fact in the details that "households" have become more and more dual-income. Even if we didn't, we shouldn't ignore the 8% homelessness (random statistic, substitute it with the real govt statistic) and 20% minimum wage earners because the median is doing fine.
> 8% homelessness
FWIW, homelessness in the U.S. is currently about 0.18%
I don't think so. It's still a 1 in 3 chance of earning less with a college degree than without. It's useful to show how much overlap there is.
You could also argue that the bottom third of college graduates might also be the bottom earners without a degree, but at some point, you have to work with the real numbers that you do have, instead of hypotheticals.
To improve the article, one could have plotted the income distributions, so that readers can draw their own conclusion about risks.
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...
It's unclear exactly what qualifications apply to "a third of students earn less than $40,000" - I was not able locate an actual source for this claim - but the way it's written, it appears to include everyone, possibly even those that are not in the workforce at all. Also, given a huge increase in nominal income over the past couple years, it's difficult to evaluate this claim without a clear sense of what time frame this covers.
It's also unreasonable to compare college graduates 4 years after graduation to a cohort that includes mid-career professionals decades into their career. Consider for instance, how much doctors tend to make 4 years after graduating from college and how unrepresentative that would be of their full career earning potential.
Impressionable students believe they can go to college, do little to no work actually comprehending the material they’re going to be using in their field of choice, and then go all “shocked pikachu” when they graduate and are unemployable.
It’s not a college problem. It’s a student problem. They believe just because they have a degree that they’re entitled to high paying jobs when a degree isn’t that special anymore.
Yeah it could be that expectations have gotten lazy. It was always the case that you get out what you put in, so if people are coasting more, then outcomes probably reflect that.
The Fed’s paper does say that the income premium for college degree remains relatively robust, as it always has. The part that they call out as changing over time is the relative savings the college educated have by the time they retire. They don’t know why though, and spending and savings habits might be changing, so the wealth premium going down might not indicate that college is less special.
It's in the interest of business to continue to add value and explore new territory. Unfortunately though this has metastasized in higher education to producing junk degrees and programs that simply do not warrant costly or even sometimes formal training.
High education has evolved from something accessible only by the elite, or the brightest (elevated on the dime of the elite) to an overpriced commodity that yields little returns. Especially in undergrad, is the cost really worth it to achieve a basic level of competency that employers then have to build on significantly after the fact?
My advice to young people in my home country (not USA) is only go if the profession you want requires it. And I'll often help them to do a cost-benefit-analysis to work out if college is the right path.
Gen Z is meant to be a productive generation, not an educated one. To hell with concepts such as upstanding citizens, as long as they are obedient at work :)
We get state-funded universities and people often start over in a different subject after realizing they didn't pick the correct one the first time around. I did that too. My and my friends' parents said this was very uncommon in their time, usually due to financial considerations.
I could definitely imagine that there's a similar situation in the US. You get to pick once and if you pick wrong, it's worse than not going to college at all.
Any other input on that? Mine is purely anecdotal and I didn't find any hard data to support or disprove my theory.
Only if you work in stuff like tech, but the world still needs many other jobs like plumbers, police officers, etc. who's jobs don't change that fast.
I've talked to quite a few very smart plumbers. The ones at the top of the field (earning good $) work with complex setups.
Does it? Last time I had major plumbing work done, a guy showed up in a very nice car (he no doubt earned very well) looked at what needed to be done and gave us quote. The two guys who barely spoke English and where on site 8-10 hours a day for a week actually doing the actual work probably earned considerably less.
US might be a different beast.
I live in western Europe where qualified plumbers earn well because it's a credentialed job and labor exploitation of migrants in credentialed Jobs is less of an issue (but still does happen). You can't just hire some migrants off the street and send them off to do plumbing for you.
A plumber in Denmark can sometimes earn more than a SW developer.
This describes software engineering as well, it is just that this site is biased towards people building new stuff rather than engineers who do maintenance work!
FWIW the plumbers I know live in nice custom houses and enjoy learning about new things all the time.
If you can't afford a house anymore because it got too expensive, then sorry mate, you're out of luck, that's the fair price of the "free market" supply/demand. Nothing we can do about it, try being less poor next time.
But if a company can't find cheap labor for the price it's willing to pay (aka labor shortage), then they can import as many workers as possible with the help of the government, until the price of labor comes down to the level they deem "fair".
Switching once is totally fine, after all you only what a given field looks like once you started. Maybe even twice. But by then one should now which field and degree to pursue.
That is one reason why I think education should be as generic as possible, if you already specialize a lot durong your studies, being young and having zero job exoerience, carries the risk of making your career a bit harder.
I know several people who took a class out of curiosity and changed their career when they found their true calling. One effect of this was that you got a much broader set of people than the typical "nerdy guy". CS stole a lot of people who originally intended to focus on studies like sociology, law, economics, psychology and philosophy, but fell in love with CS. It was also much easier to combine work and studies when you could register for classes without committing to a full 3/5 year program.
Today, the same university focus on full time students who "bind" themselves to a specific program. I feel bad for the students today who are forced to follow a much more strict program. They still have some freedom, but it's much more limited and it's harder to "cross over" if you want to follow a class that belongs to a different program. I'm not surprised that many decide to drop out.
The one interesting 'feature' of US education is that you don't really pick a subject before the 2nd or even 3rd year. It is quite possible (and common) to spend the first 2 years studying much a wider variety of subjects than you would at most European universities and then spending your final 2 years really focusing in on what you decide to be your core are of focus.
You can even do both a major and a minor, or two majors, if you're unsure.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-not-going-to-college-t...
I studied software engineering in university and it wasn't ideal but it gave me the most important stuff: the learning system and almost complete overview of software and hardware development used in computer science jobs. Most people who do self-study only learn a very small subset of this knowledge - one or two programming languages and frameworks and maybe a little bit of algorithms.
A bit of context: I undertook my 1st undergraduate program from 2007 to 2011, did an erasmus on 2010-2011, masters on 2013-2014 and Phd from 214 to 2017.
When I started at 2007 (in Spain), there was a lot of freedom. No need to go to lesson (only certain labs were compulsory), most of the the courses will not have any compulsory hand in course works. For 95% of my courses was enough to sit for the exam and pass it. Exams were difficult, rarely less than 2h and always 'unseen' problems. Failing was an option and we all experience it. You could always enroll again and try the year after. Another thing I had rarely experience afterwards, lecturer will treat you as an adult. They will talk to you as an adult, give you the freedom and expect you to behave as one.
All these freedoms allow us to learn about ourselves, do you really enjoy the topics? Do you need to spend 3h a week listening to the teacher or are you better off dealing with a different subject? Do you need 1 week to prepare for an exam or rather 9 months?
Making failure an option helped maintaining a high standard on learning outcome. There was no need to lower the bar so everyone could pass.
Also getting fees were nearly null and there were plenty of scholarships. The idea was something like everyone should have the opportunity to go to university, but only those who were ready could obtain a degree.
Later on, as I explored universities in other countries I felt it was more like, you can pay us X$ for Y years and at the end you get a shiny diploma.
Then as I shifted into software engineering, I found all the resources I needed were online. That together with the fact that universities tend to be slow to introduce new material and shift content, plus the high costs, plus the little freedom they provide, plus the focus they have on money, make universities loose appeal.
There is so much knowledge to acquire getting a degree that I kinda think that there is some agenda of making this generation dumber and dumber.
One of the things that college does well, is to teach stuff that you don't think you need, but that are so important for you.
Those that only do what their brain wants, optimize for what is more comfortable to them while university takes you out of your comfort zone.
Are there things that can be improved, yes! Of course. But go to college and have some fun learning.
In terms of social life, experiences, my heart breaks for them to miss this. Merely just the setting of getting off the chains of parents, while still not having to (that much) worry about finances and and just visiting lectures that interest you gives you a whole different scope of thinking.
Oh, and employers sometimes filter on 'has degree' vs 'no degree' when selecting who to interview. It hasn't seemed to matter that my degree (music, specifically music performance) was completely irrelevant to my chosen line of work, and has contributed nothing to my career. I should've just skipped class.
You can get any book online for free. Any research paper. Any textbook. Any information you like that is known to more than a couple of people. You can even get almost all MIT coursework free, they give it to you. You. can get a full education watching videos and reading books online, for free. Illegal or no, if you are in it for the education and not for the credential you don't have to pay anyone for it anymore. As long as the internet exists this is a fact of life. Another fact of life is that only middling people get paid for credentials, the big bucks are earned by people that know what they're talking about and have some expertise. You need a credential to be mediocre, you need to excel at something to be excellent, and anybody that recognizes excellence doesn't need a piece of paper to confirm it.
The rent seeking information brokers are all very mad about this of course. From news media to education to publishing, they're all clamoring something be done about it. But nothing can be done about it. They'll sell you the "college experience", the "need to stay informed", they'll guilt you, they'll try to scare you, but at best it buys them a little time. Nothing holds back the tide and their days are numbered as powerful institutions in our society.
In fields that aren't based on hard knowledge credentialism is even more important as it's less clear what to test for in interviews.