>You seem to imagine that a generation of kids should be happy going to trade school and working as plumbers.

We tell every kid to go to college, but the reality is that many of them simply aren't cut out for it. They _should_ be developing a trade skill, but they don't, so they end up with a near useless degree (or not even that), a mountain of debt, and no real skills to speak of.

What's wrong with being a plumber, or an electrician, or a carpenter? They are absolutely required functions and I imagine many degree holders aren't entirely happy with their shitty office jobs paying less than they would make on a job site.

There is nothing wrong about being a plumber, electrician, carpenter etc, except when your dad is a carpenter, and you see him breaking his knees all day, while the media is flooded by young, good-looking people making twice what he makes working in an air-conditioned building with a gym and bean bags chairs.

Then everyone wants to do it, and suddenly big companies get their pick ivy league applicants, Podunk U gets a pile of cash for selling a dream, and the young adult is left on the hook.

You ell what we want and what we can have are often very different things. This has been true literally since the dawn of time, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Problem is people who dont have the IQ or talent to work at Google are constantly told they do in school.

Then reality hits and the debt doesnt go away.

I can't ever recall a single professor giving me or any other student any sort of positive reinforcement about "special" job opportunities upon graduation. Students might tell these lies to each other, but I doubt there are many universities where professors are willing to blow that kind of smoke up their students' collective asses.

A lot of my school was like that, but it wasn't really the teachers' faults. Job opportunities in the field I went to school for tend to be primarily with government organizations or work that is funded by government grants or other such things.

Pretty much for the 20 years prior to me going to school, it was a great field to get into. I looked into success rates for previous graduating classes, checked out available positions and starting salaries. Worked for a few years before going to school to save a bit of money. Made, what I thought was, a fairly decent plan ended up taking out loans and going to school.

The first year was great, everything seemed positive for prospects after school me and just about everyone else got summer jobs in a related field. Then the government changed and suddenly funding for science and the environment was gone. We got to spend the rest of the time in school getting visits from federal and provincial departments telling us about all the awesome opportunities we would have had...if it had been last year...instead they told us they'd been cutting positions and we'd be lucky if we'd get hired sometime.in the next ten years.

We also got to go to a lot of different places where they showed us the work they used to do, when they were still getting money.

By the end I think less than half the people I went to school with ended up getting jobs in the field. I worked for a few years doing it, but wasn't making enough to really live or pay my loans back so I had to look for something different.

What’s the SAT percentile after which we tell students, “You probably should be considering a trade school instead.”?

agree. it annoys me when people say that college is a bad deal. ok. so what is the alternative, and no, installing WordPress templates on Freelancer is not a good one.

Not all college degrees are created equal. Not all college experiences are created equally. Not all college prices are created equally.

Going to a specific college for a specific degree can be a really bad choice, while going to another for a different degree can quickly pay off. What high school graduates need is the ability to make these sorts of judgments.

For starters, they should consider getting two degrees in a 4 year period. Many students take more than 4 years to get a single degree which significantly increases loans while having less job prospects. By aiming at two degrees, a person can choose to learn something that fulfills them while also finding something they are decent at that they can tolerate for making a living if their dream job doesn't materialize.

Second, consider that some degrees are far less valuable unless you go past the undergraduate level, and so they need to take into account the cost of earning a graduate degree to see if it will pay off or not.

Third, consider scholarship offers and out of state/in state tuition costs. The cheapest college is rarely the best, but a university that will require 10k loans a year is likely to be a far better deal than one that requires 50k loans a year.

Fourth, learn to network and build references while in college.

All of these are things high schools could be better teaching their students about that would make what ever college they eventually pick a much better deal.

> For starters, they should consider getting two degrees in a 4 year period. Many students take more than 4 years to get a single degree which significantly increases loans while having less job prospects.

I think quadrupling the work load of a student is only going to pan out with extremely talented individuals. This sounds entirely too unrealistic to be practical advice.

It won't be quadrupling the work load. It will be going from 15 credit hours to 20 credit hours. An increase of 33%, 50% being the upper limit for degrees with the least bit of cross over. This is because each degree will share the same general requirements and will count as each other's electives. Of course this won't work out for every combination nor for every degree program.

It will require a few things. For starters, from the first semester the student will need to know what degrees they are aiming for and plan accordingly with their advisers. It will require sacrificing some of the fun of college for a more practical approach. It will require giving up any hope of having no classes on a Friday. That's not about being talented though, but about discipline.

If the student will be taking out possible $100,000 or more and they can't do this, then they need to evaluate what they are about to do. Are they about to risk life long debt for an education or for a college experience? If they don't know if what they are studying is what they want to do, should they really be paying someone to teach them how to do it?

Also, if following their passion is something that is extremely difficult for them to learn, then perhaps college is not the right path for them to follow that passion. There has to be some realism on focusing on what you are good at.

This is all much easier when high schools adequately prepare people for college. I wonder how much of the increasing problems at the college level are a result of high schools providing educations of lowering adequacy.

at US universities, it's more like 1.5X the workload or less. There are typically large numbers of general or elective course requirements that can satisfy requirements for 2 or more degrees simultaneously.

Evaluate your skills. What you have to offer and make a realistic choice.

They can go to local universities that are within their means for starters. I find that invariably those in the worse debt are the ones who go to a super expensive private university in a distant state without the means to pay for it. And they always choose a degree which has a poor career prognosis.

Inevitably in these sorts of threads the meme of "bad decisions from humanities majors" comes up but never any supporting data. Best I can tell there aren't that many english, etc majors graduating to account for the amount of student debt being generated. The unfortunate truth is a technology degree is just as likely to leave you with debt and no options (especially if you "go to local university far from a tech hub").

Source for enrollment in humanities falling https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/26/where-have-al...

Here's some direct comparison of default rates - https://assets.rbl.ms/18240752/980x.png (from https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/what-kind-of-student-is...) shows a significantly higher rate of student loan defaults in the arts/humanities fields.

It is worth noting that the difference between selective schools and nonselective schools is even larger; so going "somewhere" to get a shitty degree seems to be not a good idea as well.

I didn't read it as saying not to get a degree - but to do so without such a large amount of debt. There are many ways to do this.

I did it via the military. There are other options - that's just one.

Do they scale? If a large number of people actually all together tried something else, would it work?

Doesn't this line of reasoning assume that right now there is a big misallocation and some are way over capacity while others have lots of space capacity? I would assume that whatever the current situation, capacity distribution is about equal to how it is. So any big shifts would not be possible short and even medium term. And if the needed shift happens, would the result, the new equilibrium, really be different, or would we still have a similar situation, just with he pieces shuffled around?

The problem with solutions that individuals like to come up with is that they only work for individuals. I try to always imagine my idea(s) on a large scale, what if everybody really does it? Lots and lots of "good advice" does not actually scale. When you change only a few things the big picture remains constant, so many of those ideas work. But as soon as there are large scale changes there are feedback effects and the context changes too, what used to be a constant environment will have changed too.

That's the problem: free college doesn't scale. A place like Germany, which has about half the college enrollment figures than the US (~6-7% for the US, 3-4% for Germany) has excess capacity and even lets some foreigners study for free. The US is in the opposite end of the supply : demand ratio.

Ultimately I think the crux of the problem is that in the United States a lack of a college education is seen as a serious character flaw. A lot of Americans understand this, but I think it's important to illustrate this for non-Americans. A lack of a college education is seen a such a flaw that it automatically invalidates the prospect of marriage for many people [1]. Democrats (and I count myself among them) often tout the fact that they regularly win most of the vote among college educated voters - how this is supposed to be a positive unless one views the opinions of non-college educated as lesser is a mystery to me. Outside of low-class neighborhoods, a child failing to get admitted to university is an embarrassment. I personally don't agree with these things, and they're likely far from universal, but I do think they illustrate

The result, I think, is a large segment of the population taking on debt to get an education that won't actually yield much of a return in the labor market. And the messed up thing is that in a way they are making a sound choice because the stigma of being uneducated is so strong. Whereas in many places like the aforementioned Germany getting an apprenticeship and becoming a skilled worker is respected. I've heard stories about this shifting and the requirements to attending gymnasium (the college-bound educational track) are loosening, but it's still probably nowhere near the level as in America.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-...

I don't understand your very low college enrollment figures.

Also, if you look at Germany, there are "Universität", "Hochschule" - but also "Fachhochschule".

Enrollment is at almost 60% - according to the text on the right that's the share of those who begin a study on the entire population born in the respective year: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/72005/umfrage...

The enrollment rates I provided are the percentage of the total population that are enrolled in university. It is important to consider the fact that the US population is younger by a considerable margin as compared to Germany. Even if the degree attainment rates aren't very far off, the percentage of population enrolled in university can be significantly different due to that age difference.

These statistics are from an Economist article, which I can try and track down if I have the time.

Edit: Didn't track down the economist article, but here are sources on US and German enrollment rates:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 reports 19.9 million students. About 6 to 6.2% of the US population.

https://www.uni-bonn.de/studying/international-students/coun... reports 2.8 million germany university students. About 3.4% of the population.

I don't see that those enrollment rates are of use for the discussion, that they show anything useful. Especially given the difference in cost and the high number of (paying) international students supporting the US system.

Not to mention that Germany has an extensive professional education system ("Facharbeiter" to "Meister") that he US does not have, so what's the point of only looking at one part of the education system?

I would not even be sure if we are actually counting the same thing on both sides. When the US means "higher education", not all institutions are MIT and Harvard grade. Is all that you counted in your number actually comparable to what Germans mean when we count higher (university) education? See my 2nd paragraph, is some of that kind of education possibly counted in your US number, while in German it is a whole extra branch?

The enrollment rates are absolutely central to the discussion. Demand is drastically higher in the US - partly due to a young population, partly due to the strong social stigma of not having a university education. Higher demand creates higher costs.

The figures given are for all postsecondary education. I'm not sure why this is a controversial statistic. The younger US population would mean that even if the same percentage of graduating secondary school students go on to university, the US enrollment percentages would still by higher. Coupled with a higher percentage of students that seek university degrees after finishing secondary education (~70% for the US as compared to ~50% for Germany as per some quick Google searches) and a total enrollment figure of twice the rate of Germany is about what one would expect.

> I'm not sure why this is a controversial statistic.

Did anybody here dispute the statistics? I must have missed that.

I think you ignored about 2/3 of what I wrote (yes, I edited my comment, if you used a notification service you may have missed it)...

>You seem to imagine that a generation of kids should be happy going to trade school and working as plumbers.

Not at all.

This has to be a troll.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

14% of people at Google still represents a slim portion of the tech workforce. I tried to search for how many software developers don't have a university degree. I did find that 40-50% don't have a CS or CS-related degree, but all I found was a Quora post saying 3% don't have degrees at all - and this was an un-sourced post that didn't share any methodology so we should take it with a grain of salt.