College Degree Value

The author probably means that it makes a lot of sense of offer people who don't want to go to uni a better perspective than working tough manual labour or minimum wage service industry jobs for the rest of their life. Not every degree currently taught at university is really necessary to perform well in the jobs that those graduates normally get. America would do well to re-evalute the necessity of degrees when vocational training can produce equally skilled workers at a much lower cost fo

The reality is that, 50 years ago, when only the smartest people attented colleges, a college degree used to be a proxy for aptitude (a combination of intelligence and willingness to work hard). It didn't matter that much what you studied, just having that college diploma meant that you're smart enough to be able to contribute in a non-trivial manner in any company, and will likely be heading for a managerial position a couple years in. Whereas now, with a huge percentage of population

I see a lot of HN comments on these issues treating college education as a commodity/investment, blaming students/society for making poor "choices" (I'd like to remind you of the cost and selective nature of STEM programs, not everyone is able to enroll in the highest valued degree due to circumstances beyond their control-- it's not always a choice), and using economic indicators like ROI to measure the "value" of degrees. Some commenters go so far as to

Most jobs don't require higher education.Most jobs that do require higher education don't actually make any use of the higher education.Are people who didn't follow the author up the ivory tower all failures who just fell through the cracks? What if some people are perfectly happy working in HVAC? These articles are always so condescending. The position that all people should by default go to college and that people who don't are lesser-than and fell through the cracks,

I think part of the problem is that most industrialized nations have pushed for high percentage of the population to have a college/university degree, while not considering whether the degrees are needed for the jobs that are going to be available. This means that there is a discrepancy between the supply and demand of workers and jobs and their education levels. People go to college to study something for which there is absolutely no demand, and end up unemployed, having used years of their lif

The effect for society, however, is otherwise. When the share of college graduates rises, the availability of good jobs barely changes. The more degrees job seekers have, the more degrees job seekers need to keep their applications out of the garbage can. When formal education expands, students need college degrees to get the same jobs their parents got with high school degrees - and their grandparents got with even less.University != Trade SchoolAmerican's insistence on a U

College was once a signal of competence. That cannot be true when you push half the population through the system; the normal distribution is still the same. Doubly so given the commodification of education, which creates perverse incentives for phenomena like grade inflation, further reducing the value of a degree as a signal.The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone

College isn't about job training, it's more about demonstrating that one is good prospective employee (signalling).[1][1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education#:...

I sympathize with and agree with a lot of the points you're making, but think they apply in an environment that doesn't really apply anymore. Our society as a whole is trending toward a situation where I think other factors are at play too.I have never had student loan debt, so I'm not trying to defend any decisions I made.However, part of why I was able to do that was because college was actually affordable at the time I went. Not easy to afford, but not something that woul

The economics of higher education isn't aligned between personal and societal interest in general. College degrees are a positional good - a good portion of their value is for allocating a job to Peter instead of Paul. Even as people rationally choose more prestigious and more thorough education, we end up destroying value on a societal scale.Like, even if a daycare worker finds it easier to get a job with a college degree, are we better off as a society if more daycare workers have coll