They grew up in a world where a bachelor's degree - any bachelor's degree - virtually guaranteed at least a middle class lifestyle, if not an upper middle class one. Many of them can't fathom the idea of graduating from college and then not being able to find a job that pays a living wage. Especially the ~2/3 of them who don't hold bachelor's degrees themselves.
It is not only about finding a job (I believe with a "sensible" degree you will always find one), but about finding a job that pays well enough so that beside the costs of living (which are enormous in some regions) also the college debts can be paid back in a reasonable time.
My point is just that a solution to this problem that requires teenagers and their parents to accurately predict the future of a complex society is not actually a solution at all.
On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore the financials. It's not about "useful vs useless." All courses of study are useful. People are getting saddled with piles of debt that they can't manage, though, and US law doesn't allow you to declare bankruptcy from your student loans, so people can potentially end up screwed for life. Against that kind of a backdrop, to blithely charge students whatever tuition they're willing to pay, regardless of whether or not they can expect to be able to pay it, is heartless.
So then the question arises, how do you increase the chances that nobody gets shackled with unmanageable debt for life? Changing the earning power conferred by different majors is a possibility. But, capitalism being what it is, that's going to require either changing the demand for those skills, or changing the supply of people who have those skills. It's hard to imagine how the former can be managed without some sort of government subsidy.
There are myriad ways you could affect the supply side, though. Doing something to put universities on the hook for how much their students earn, such as having students pay a % of their income to their alma mater for a decade or two in lieu of all or part of their tuition, would certainly do it. Universities would hopefully respond by starting to limit the number of seats available in departments that feed into less lucrative career paths right quick, in order to make sure that every department is financially sustainable. That would, in turn, reduce the supply of people with those skills, which would translate into an upward trajectory in how much it costs to hire someone with those skills.
But what is that kind of approach, if not a distinctly capitalist riff on the idea of "delineating useful vs. useless degrees"?
And if not something like that, then what?
(I think there's a famous anecdote by Bobby Jindal where his father told him that he could be anything he wanted to be -- any kind of doctor that is)
Heavy-handed? Yes. Effective? Also yes.
Edit: found a reference that says parents must support children until they are 21 or have a profession to support themselves (presumably whichever is sooner -- I hope!).
> Edit: found a reference that says parents must support children until they are 21 or have a profession to support themselves (presumably whichever is sooner -- I hope!).
According to
> https://www.merkur.de/leben/geld/erwachsen-kind-finanzieren-...
if the child studies at a university, the parents have to pay for them until it gets its master's degree (which is typically much longer than up to the 21 years of age). There are exceptions, such as if the parents can prove that the child does not concentrate on his studies or if it changes the degree course "too often" etc. But assume that the normal case is that the parents have to support the child up to master's degree.
If they advice this, they should put their money where their mouth is, i.e. be willing to pay for a substantial part of the college debt.
So why can't one simply expect from grown-up people to do the same for the degree that ones planes do get?