The student debt problem is not really related to the college format. The format existed in earlier decades, exists in other countries and exists in K-12 education without runaway costs and student debt.

It's mostly a matter of policy. The US' method to expand third level education to most of the population was by government backed and/or subsidized loans, without price controls. This caused an inflation in credit, prices, and cost. This is reversible, but deflation is always painful.

Meanwhile, I disagree that “underwater basket weaving” degrees are the problem. At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance.

These business degrees are fake subjects. The material was invented for the purpose of creating a textbook, course or somesuch. Nothing they teach is useful. Worryingly, these have the greatest intake... because they're easy, and sound relevant to getting a job.

I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.

But, I also think we should try to keep the level of investment (time, money, social capital) in education high. Get efficient by doing more, not doing the same for less.

I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is related to how well that choice of study does for them in the real world.

International relations, anthropology, women's studies, psychology, etc., are all real subjects that students are actually interested in. Some small fraction of the people who study them actually go on to do something near-related to those topics. Many (most?) others go on to work recruiters, office managers, in call centers (etc), immediately throwing away their studies and never revisiting them.

"online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves.

The trend hopefully is not just in how study happens but what people choose to study, because a lot of time and money is being wasted in things that never get used, because a lot of students have no real interests, and we teach them if they choose and go to college for anything - anything at all - then they'll magically do well. This is a lie and a disservice. We should be pushing people towards STEM and trade schools. Hopefully this situation helps do that.

Most business courses are literally fake. The stuff being taught was invented in order to be taught. Quite a lot of it is learning the meaning of terms that were invented in order to be taught. It's not that there aren't real business subjects. Finance and accounting are real subjects. Economics is a real subject, in the sense that philosophy is a real subject. Statistics, etc.

The trend is (and has been for decades) to teach mostly (or only) fluff courses.

The bottom third of these things are functional equivalents of diploma mills. Ask business graduates over a pint. Most will admit it.

In my experience "International Relations" classes teach very little that's actually valuable. I think there's a common in mistake in thinking at because X is important, then university classes about X are useful. There are a lot of subjects that are important but where the study of it in academia (at least at the undergraduate level, but I suspect higher up as well) isn't handled well at all.

I think the mistake that a lot of people make, however, is thinking that this is merely a humanities vs. STEM issue. There also seems to be a lot (though perhaps not quite as much) useless classes in the STEM fields as well.

Worst of all, I've seen very little interest in academia (both STEM and the humanities) in whether or not their way of teaching is effective - its simply assumed to be, and that's the end of the discussion much of the time. It's claimed that academia fosters critical thinking, but there often seems to be a dearth of critical thinking from those who are within it.

I didn’t find any of it relevant at the time. Fast forward 25 years and now that my IT work is distributed full-remote global operations, it turns out my IR foundation gives me a unique [perspective] and VERY influential position in an Engineering org.

So there is a certain long-term value in cross-training in this way.

Also, many of the things that were covered in IR classes weren't just useless, but more often than not turned out to be entirely detached from reality. For instance, focusing on things like Thomas Huntington vs. Thomas Friedman (neither of who seem to have had a great track record or understanding of the world).

It ended up being a powerful ‘soft’ asset in a transition to engineering management, by virtue of being the staffmember able to identify and resolve problems which originated in cultural and linguistic domains.

One does not need IR training to (say) socially engineer a budget prioritization for sending engineers on overseas exchanges, but I feel it influenced my thinking in this regard.

This forms what I think is the underlying thread here. For those that aren't as flexible and creative in applying their talents and education, most of these classes really do end up being useless, and for them, a waste of money in the long run.

If you're already capable, chances are that no matter your field of study, you're going to land somewhere that you can find a way to use your knowledge; but this really seems to me more a case of interest and driven/natural critical thinking skills than it is a reflection of the content of the classes. Those that apply themselves can find niches to sharpen their skills, whereas those opportunities aren't necessarily sought out by everyone.

So, in effect, while some individuals taking classes of any sort, even poorly taught, might have the fervor to find a path towards enrichment, not all students will have this experience. And this leads to the "basket weaving" degrees for others: subjects that, while not generally irrelevant a priori, are generally irrelevant for many experientially.

There is another aspect which I will add: the ‘softest’ parts of the liberal arts curriculum — International Relations would fit here — was until recently reserved for aristocrats. The children of farmers and factory workers would ostensibly have no use in learning The Great Game. The best players of the game are those who need no employment.

Those of us from anything but the uppermost classes back then would be stumbling into the edges of a world they can dimly perceive, to serve as clerks at best.

Even with decades of professional experience as a diplomat or analyst, your sample size of countries and international situations will be very small. Having both a theoretical understanding of the underlying dynamics, and a broad view of the whole problem space as it has been explored historically, is qualitatively different from the lessons you get on the job.

He was supposedly in his 80s but appeared 60. His ancestors were some kind of lords of the forests; his father was responsible for training Gurkhas, though he himself preferred the company of the muhajadeen as a boy (photos provided).

He displayed gold disks which could buy humans at certain markets, and spoke of tribes which taught him how to travel in Dreamtime. It was literally thrilling stuff, all too fantastic to believe if not for the artifacts....

From the POV of a student entering a job market, anthropology or international studies may be completely useless. But the student gained real knowledge that is useful for some jobs (even if they're not pursuing them). And it can be useful in their life. To use a CS analogy, I never needed calculus or control theory during my $dayjobs, but I use them for myself, to better understand the world and occasionally on hardware hobby projects.

Meanwhile, those fake degrees are literally scams. I.e. students (and their families) are being scammed for their money. The topics are self-referential (invented to be taught), and exist in order to justify spending few years on them, so that the degree rewards putting in work - which makes that degree valuable for employers in the first place. And during the course of that degree, various entities - universities, textbook publishers, etc. - are bleeding students dry. It's not just a degree mill, it's a money printer. The degree becomes purely proof of work, and on top of wasted years of your life, you also have to pay for it.

Please provide examples. I thought Communications was bullshit until I read a textbook. Cyber security is not a bullshit field even though actual practitioners hold degree programmes in it in extremely low esteem. What are some examples of business or other degrees that are in some objective sense valueless? Criminal justice degrees or fire science ones are hazing credentialism but they’re not literally worthless and the research they’re based on is real.

At least humanities courses teach students to write. They're basically essay writing classes.

The one who'd dropped out was clearer and more consistent in their writing than the BA in English. Perhaps math enforces a level of pragmatism that the humanities don't?

Anecdotal, of course, but I've seen this pattern often.

I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before.

The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/

Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.

Am I reading the chart correctly? If so, I don't see how your link favors your argument.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-ste...

There isn't a crisis of unemployed liberal arts majors in America or the world, there is a reason for that. Of course there are a lot of people that have convinced themselves that there is such a crisis!

I also agree that it's a problem that a lot of people are going into college just because they don't have any other ideas and it's seen as a respectable thing to do. I think the main cause is that our society doesn't give nearly enough support to people entering the workforce, and is oddly determined for people to move from being a full-time student to a full-time worker, with nothing in between.

Might as well cut the S and M off that because most people who get a science degree probably aren't working in the filednwithout higher education and even the there's so few jobs available. Most people with math education probably aren't working directly in mathematics, but at least you can make the argument that there are other fields where math is related enough to be somewhat useful.

I think while the correlation may be weaker than what some claim, it is still there. To put it another way, I have seen very few cases of students who hated the field, were force-fed it and then would turn it a successful career. And a few that would do that tend to look for opportunities to change course. Being really interested in a subject is a great encouragement to acquire deep knowledge, not just a good grade. And such deep knowledge can bring benefits for the rest of the life.

As an example: I have a PhD in math but "tossed it" and went to work writing software and algorithms. My employers never cared about my PhD. I never used much of the "PhD" math I learned in grad school and I probably forgot most of it. Computing a homology group? Topological entropy? Forget it.

But was the PhD a waste? I do not think so! As a side effect of being in grad school, teaching undergrad classes and arguing with friends doing math and physics I became friends with many fields and learned techniques that still serve me well. So definitely no regrets for me for spending 5 years learning things I did not directly use afterwards.

I do agree with your last point -- we should not be telling students that anything they study will lead them to success after graduation. They should choose a field with some applications. But among the multitude of such fields they should choose one they genuinely like. My 2c.

You are drawing a line that is convenient to your argument.

I have an engineering degree, and worked for a bunch of years in my discipline. As part of the degree, I had to take 3 calculus courses and one differential equations course. Never needed them on the job. I took 2 circuits courses, 3 electronics courses, 2 communications courses, 2 E&M courses, 1 control theory course, and 1 microcontrollers course - all part of my major. About half were mandatory (not electives). Of these, only 2 courses were relevant for my job. I could have done it as effectively as I did without taking all those other courses.

Amongst engineers, my engineering experience is not an outlier. My experience is the norm. Even while I was in college that was the feedback I would get from people in industry: Most of the engineering courses are useless for your job, and getting the degree is merely a formality and not much of an indicator of knowledge/expertise. The whole "a degree shows you can commit to something for a dedicated amount of time" is mostly a post hoc justification.

Your argument that a "small fraction" of people who study them actually go on to use them applies very well to engineering degrees. I suspect they would apply equally well to CS degrees as well. I mean, I'm the perfect example. I took very little CS in school, but make a living as a SW professional.

Most people I know who got math degrees (but not a PhD) use almost none of it in their jobs - even the technical jobs. Ditto for physics. Should we do away with these as well?

In general, look at all the people who have a BS degree in something other than CS and are working in the SW industry. Look at their degrees. While engineers like me often actually do go on to become engineers, for probably all other majors (math, physics, literature, philosophy, etc) you'll find they rarely get a job in their discipline.

I've lived in countries where those subjects are usually not offered in universities. It really sucks. You usually end up with 2 scenarios:

A class full of people who don't care about the subject but are taking it because society has deemed that what they are interested in is not to be taught in universities. This often results in a lowering of the standards to appease them (who are often in the majority). Indeed, many math majors in the US complain about this - calculus, diff eq and linear algebra are usually taught to cater to engineers, and not math majors.

Or you'll get the other extreme, where the standards are made unnecessarily tight to keep those people out, but in effect also then prevent decent students who are interested in the topic from studying it.

Almost all math graduates at my undergrad ended up going into (a) finance as quants, (b) PhD program, (c) data or SWE-related job in tech [me], or (d) some kind of K-12 math educator job.

Probably 30% PhD, 30% SWE/data in tech, 20% quant, 20% K-12 education. The people who did K-12 wanted to do that for much of their life typically, and the people who did PhD either (50%) knew that's exactly what they wanted to or, or really didn't know what they wanted to do.

Perhaps our program doesn't reflect the story on a national level though. Unsure there.

I mean thinking of a typical non specialized business BA here (Germany) the math and statistics classes are pretty useful, as is the basic economics primer. The required law courses and tax related courses are pretty useful. Accounting, finance and controlling are useful as well and so are marketing (mostly math/data analysis), strategy, project management and production management (usually operations research centric but also covers quality management). HR seems fairly meh unless you want to go into HR (as the most relevant stuff is already covered in law).

The typical electives cover more in depth of the above and sometimes business information systems, psychology, programming and the like.

And there's some other stuff that's pretty useful like negotiation classes or case studies (if they cover interesting topics).

As I said, I have one of these degrees, and have hired and worked with many people with such degrees.

First, I agree that the math and (particularly) the statistics classes are useful. Finance and accounting too, in theory, though the vast majority do not seem to internalize much. Business pretty minimal though. A 3-4 years business degree comes with less math education than the first year of an engineering degree, chemistry, physics, etc.

Also.. the majority of business degrees today allow students to avoid most math altogether... and most students do this. The whole thing is continuously moving downmarket. Most business degrees (graduate & undergraduate) are not recognised BAs anymore.

"The market" wants easy degrees with no math. They also don't want accounting or finance. This leaves just the nonsense.

IMO, at this point, most business degrees are less useful than history, philosophy, etc. Graduate salaries are about the same.

Why does it matter if they’re BA or something else? And recognised by who?

And obviously a postgrad business degree is not going to be a BA... because that’s an undergrad degree.

I think if you’re saying a MBA from a reputable school is useless I think you’re being really really silly. I see the opportunities these degrees give you and they are in a most literal sense extremely useful. They also seem academically valuable to me, with fascinating lectures by extremely well qualified people, and visiting amazing institutions.

The only place, where I've seen this super-useless business-degrees actually was a private uni, selling a "marketing" bachelors. Not sure, what the person (acquaintance of my sister) learned there, but apparently it didn't even know a lot about the internet as a marketplace, last time I talked...

Counterpoint: most software developers I've known.

I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.

I guess that's fine for them, but I would want more for myself, and for my children.

I did exactly that. Lived at home, attended college, and also worked nearly full time to pay for school. I graduated with nearly no debt, and the the day after graduating college moved out with a good job.

Not sure how that makes someone a coward or afraid to go outside their small circle. Some of the people I went to HS with all went to the same big state school so they could actually stay in the their small circle. Once done, they moved back to where we grew up, are still in the same small circle, and have/had large college debt to go along with it.

I haven't seen anyone from HS in over 15 years, and have lived and traveled all over. I would be cautious to paint people making financially prudent decisions with such a broad brush.

Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss.

I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (lived in a small city next to uni-town, where there's basically nothing happening and except for my small circle, I didn't find HS people very interesting...), but basically all the great experiences cost money and/or time of which there is none, if you really do it in a financially sound way while studying something MINTy... (and I doubt that feeling like a slave is the glorious experience).

Note: probably I was a coward in the beginning for not moving away, because then I could have gotten state-assistance and cheap student dorms... Though that's kind of a though choice, when your uni of choice is basically the academically best around in your country... (and frankly, at this point I didn't have a lot of people telling me, that this not necessarily is, what you want in a bachelors degree...)

I think many of the people who weren’t well off only afforded this experience by taking on debt.

Besides, there’s more ways than just college to have that “real” growth experience. Military, mission work, peace corps. Hell, I’d even argue these are more of an experience because they aren’t built on the somewhat artificial backdrop of universities that can insulate you from the “real” world without all the debt downside

Military has actual big price in people who join it. Veterans do have issues to adjust back to civilian society. Which is basically euphemism for whole host of serious issues. Military families divorce often and their famillies do have actual issues due to frequent moving or partner long term away. Domestic violence rates are high.

The whole growth experience is leaving quite a few people in difficult situations after.

And it rubs me wrong when it is framed as "less insulated the 'real' world. It is as insulated as it gets. Or as "real life" or "real growth" as opposed to "not real life" in quite common experience of either college or job or having familly that functions in more normal way.

It is called sacrifice for a reason.

This is true. It’s not a cakewalk for everybody. But the dichotomy of some of those difficult situations is they can both foster growth and simultaneously stress is an individual. I think some would say that stress/sacrifice is a necessary precursor for that growth. Unfortunately, sometimes the stress exceeds the individuals coping mechanisms.

The book Tribe gives an interesting perspective on military service. The author wrote it after his personal growth (and stress) from creating the documentary Restrepo about the outpost of the same name in Afghanistan.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/02...

And it is not in your individual controll to engage with experiences or not. Being soldier is opposite of making individual choices. You do a lot in groups, group conformity and group cohesion are bug things, you get told what to do.

I don’t know your age or experience, but what you said doesn’t ring true to me. If you’re deployed to a non-combat zone you don’t just get a day off every couple weeks. You have liberty most nights and weekends, at least if you’re not actually stationed on a ship.

It’s no different than college. You can be the person who just holes up and plays video games, or just go out in the same groups without exposing yourself to different ideas, or you can get out of your comfort zone. I’ve known people who made the most of their free time by regularly volunteering in local clinics/emergency rooms, lived outside of base in the city with locals, exposed themselves to local culture etc. There’s more freedom than many think. And this is coming from lower enlisted ranks of one of the branches with a reputation of being more disciplined and strict.

I think that if you have good relationships with parents, do your part in the house chores, the school nearby is actually good, there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at home. If you cant wait till you leave the family home, then maybe it is not that you are super mature, maybe simply relationships in your family sux. Which is not a badge of honor.

To add, living outside of campus have one big advantage - freaking uninterrupted sleep time.

How dare you place judgement on other people's circumstances. Moving away from your family to immerse yourself in your studies is certainly one way to grow as a person, but far from the only way.

Maybe someone has to take care of a family member and can't realistically do that, even if they wanted to. However, taking classes while also taking care of a family member, is that a coward or someone strong?

Maybe someone already knows the path they want to take in life and they see the cost of room and board as an unnecessary expense they can instead save to buy a condo elsewhere. Is that person a coward for being focused or strong?

Maybe someone needs a familiar support network such as a strong family to thrive academically. Is that person a coward for being self aware or strong?

How many people did you meet your freshman year who you thought in the back of your mind, wow they really should have taken a gap year. All they did was waste money on tuition and room and board while they partied and failed courses. Are all these people strong for making lifelong friendships against their better judgement or cowards?

So many reasons why people chose the path they do, I could keep going on here. I would have thought someone getting a liberal arts education would be open minded to other experiences. It sounds like you judge people who not follow in your footsteps, and for that, how dare you!

this might be true of the people you know, but I hope you don't think it holds in general. at the state school I went to, room and board cost the same amount as the in-state tuition itself. for a lot of families, this is not "minimal". if your parents have a spare room and already cook dinner every night, this almost doubles the cost of your education.

if your parents treat you like an adult (ie, you control your schedule, no curfew, etc.), there's no reason why you can't get the full college experience as a commuter.

I agree that the spending time immersed in the university environment is one of the most important parts of the college experience, but you don't have to get expensively kenneled on campus to do that, just spend time on campus with interesting people and interesting organizations.

I would only suggest most people deal with on-campus housing if it is being primarily paid for by a scholarship or grant they won't have to pay back and/or their circumstances don't offer a good alternative. If you're attending a school where there is an option for family (or whatever) that can provide you with a non-distracting environment and a _short_ commute for cheap, do that for a year. Once you establish a cohort of known-reliable friends with similar needs, rent with them, or pick up a modest apartment. I will say, IMO, renting with unknown quantity randos from a campus-predator slumlord _is_ a worse option to university housing, it includes both sets of disadvantages.

I'm also of the opinion that you have a substantial number of gen-eds you still have to take (not covered by APs, etc.), and they won't be paid for by a scholarship, do a year or so at a community college. It will be cheaper and better than the university service courses - gigantic sections taught from materials outsourced to ed-tech carpetbaggers, supervised by disinterested graduate students with alarming English skills, optimized to extract tuition from kids who statistically won't make it. I say this after years of discovering my students who took their early calculus sequence at community college, embarrassingly, tend to be more mathematically literate than the ones who did it at the university. I'm not yet convinced if that is because the ones that had the maturity to do it that way are predisposed and/or usually a little older, or the quality of the early sequence at [intentionally unnamed university] are really that poor.

I suspect room and board costs what it does compared to tuition simply because putting undergrads in a big lecture just doesn’t cost all that much. In addition, the tuition for resident students gets subsidized, while the room and board generally doesn’t.

My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.

We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.

Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.

I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.

The one exception was they knew about me even though I didn't know about them. Halfway through one of my interviews I realized that I knew the interviewer by reputation.

Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.

Exactly. This comment is quite insensitive even if ignoring the tuition costs in America. There are other reasons for living at home with your parents while going to university. I personally had to do this due to severe chronic health problems. I was 100% capable of going to university full time while working part time. I just needed to be able to live at home.

In reality, required room and board (usually for freshmen) is merely a way for colleges to make money. The whole "experience" angle is a pretext, but not the real reason. I'm glad my undergrad did not require it.[1] I don't doubt some people benefit from it, but I'm sure most don't. Anecdotally, those who stayed in dorms were more likely to party a lot more and be less focused on studies - lots of distractions. I personally knew quite a few who eventually moved off campus for the sole purpose of eliminating those distractions because their grades were dropping.

[1] I did not stay with family, I paid rent in an apartment. Definitely cheaper. The amusing thing is we folks who had our own apartment generally perceived those who stayed on campus as being less mature. They had meal plans, etc, whereas we were responsible for cooking, etc. I forget what else those who lived on campus had spoon fed to them, but it went beyond just meals.

Small state schools are closer to that, but any of the bigger schools seem to think that because students get easy access to excessive amounts of cheap loans, they can be extravagant in budgeting- sports facilities, gyms, administration, etc.

I guess you could say the same for a publicly-funded system, but at least there the funding is limited and controlled. A lot of people sadly won't blink twice at taking out a larger college loan, even if it'll saddle them with crippling debt later on.

1. Anecdotal evidence that you know a few people that didn't grow up for whatever reason does not mean everyone is like that.

2. In most asian culture, people live with their parents for the entirety of life. Somehow according to you more than half the world's population is cowards. I digress because we're talking about american colleges and living in America but it still baffles me that someone educated like you would think there is nothing wrong with a stupid argument using selection bias.

As a non Asian (with an admittedly fictional Asian pseudonym) I happen to be a member of a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits. It’s an extremely popular group, largely made up of young high school to late-20s Asian-Americans (and expats living in other western countries). The most common and persistent theme is the tension between westernized Asian kids and their traditional parents. These kids are desperate to get away from this controlling influence. They find temporary relief and camaraderie by joking about how extremely strict their parents are.

I dunno honestly. Maybe it is different elsewhere, but the college was the most uniform place I have been at. I am not complaining, I liked the experience and did fit in. But it was not diversity in literally any sense of the word.

While the other was a generic and bland sadness that suck the life out of the room and "binge drinking" is the closest form to a local culture and even things which should be a source of culture like the arts are just another box to be checked on somebody's list for posturing's sake.

Was it religious school which went secular in practice or offically? I know some who suspect that the number one reason for that blandness is former religious school that lost the fundamentalist character which drove out the heterodox and was then left with a despeciated monocultural void.

I think for better or for worse what actually drives the selection of people determines the resulting culture and diversity.

But pretty much everyone around you was, well, college student of roughly same age. And plus everyone was focused on math, computer science or something similar. The university itself had other fields of study, obviously, but they had own building so practically you rarely really interacted with each other.

The city it was in obviously had sports clubs, entertainment and whatnot where you could meet non-college students or people of different age or people who study something different. You was not forced to close yourself into some kind university bubble.

But university itself necessary collects similar people at one place. Because everyone there has to be college student and has similar choice of study.

I don't know when the last time you've lived in dorms was, but they're glorified summer camps for adolescents. Having meal plans and an RA aren't exactly badges of courage.

If you don't come from means or have parents that will help pay for you to move out, then taking on living expenses to study is not exactly a good financial choice.

Personally, I wouldn't change it for the world. Student loans covered the expenses (which as you only pay as a small percentage of your wage above a certain amount and are written off after 30 years if you haven't paid them aren't worth worry about too much), and it had both academic and social benefits. Supervisions often started after 18:00 and occasionally ran on til 23:00, and you could have lectures at 9:00 the next morning, which would be a pain with a commute, and you had easier access to resources (libraries, computing facilities).

I threw myself into the social side, having been fairly reclusive during secondary school - I felt much more comfortable doing so living on site, and I got involved in extra curricular activities I wouldn't have done if I had a commute. I had close friends studying law, natural sciences, economics, engineering, medicine, English, anthropology, and music (I studied computer science), and developed a better understanding of and appreciation for these subjects as a result (I remember discussing Roman law somehow becoming a bizarrely frequent subject in first year). I'm still in almost daily contact with the friendship group I formed there, even ten years on. I did a Master's afterwards, and lived at home, and I never felt as connected to either my studies or my peer group.

Still, I certainly wouldn't call anyone who doesn't do that a coward, and think you could get a similar or better experience living off campus at home. It just turned out to be the right step for me[1] - it pushed me enough out of my comfort zone to grow without leaving me feeling lost - and gave me a much better university experience as a result.

[1] And it was effectively required by my university - you have to live within three miles of the city centre, required permission to live outside of college, and you weren't allowed to keep a car within ten miles of the city centre without permission (https://www.proctors.cam.ac.uk/motor-control)

Your experience is true for some and false for others. That's the nature of anecdotes. I moved off campus to save a couple bucks and be "independent" and "spartan" but I missed out on a lot of stuff. I could have been closer to extracurriculars, I could have joined a frat. I get that not everyone has the resources for this stuff, but many do, and we're missing out on something if they can't experience it.

This is part of the reason why I think the level of investment needs to remain high. College performs a complex task. It can't just be replaced by coursera.

I do think that in-person lectures, course design and such need a total overhaul. Modern technology does change the equation. In-person lectures no longer make sense, for example. That doesn't mean in-person college doesn't make sense.

In theory, you could take your college costs and spend them more wisely elsewhere. Internet age gurus like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin & others have been advocating this for 20 years.

Want to learn business? Take $50k out of the $200k price tag of a fancy college and start a business with a few similarly minded people. Pay a seasoned business person to advise you. After 4 years, you will know much more about business. Same for software engineering, etc. Same for side-effects like networking horizon expansion and everything.

In practice, all that money (whether parental savings to student loans) is tied up with college. The social capital which allows anyone to spend 4 years on abstract "betterment" is tied to college. The safety nets keeping you on course to graduate aren't there.

It's theoretically possible, easy even. In practice, this level of determined heterodoxy is a 1-in-a-thousand thing. Very unlikely to be chosen and very unlikely to bee seen through by a 20-year old.

People operate within structure. We are orders of magnitude less independent than we imagine.

(Also I think the parent meant that the 20-year-old would take $50k from their parents, not $200k. But agree that $50k is likely out of reach for most people in that situation as well.)

Life works this way because life works this way. Social structures exist to reinforce the status quo, and these are only changed incrementally, over a long period of time. Potential college-goers who want to jump the queue and do something radical right now, even if it's a much better thing, are going to have a hard time unless they have well-off parents who are willing to take a shot on them.

If you think about yourself at 18... how likely would you have been to seek out social clubs, conferences, or hobby groups on your own?

I think that would be a great strategy! Spending the money on hobby groups, conferences etc could be put on a resume!

Now thinking of all kinds of options that would give better experience...it seems driving to these might be the bottleneck. But surely there are ones that can subject a student to different opinion/people etc without needing to commute. Heck even a good internship could replace dorm life, and would actually PAY the student.

This is also a description of summer camp.

I went to college late dropped out and then went to college again even later in life.

There are many more job opportunities available to me now. But funny you talk about business degrees I found out I lost a job I was qualified for to a person with a business degree. It was just Helpdesk but the business degree person had no IT experience. It was at a large well-known financial organization.

>I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.

When I went back to college many of the students younger than me had nothing but contempt for classroom style learning. Some of those people failed within the first semester or early second semester. There's also a strong belief anything can be learned by Googling it. I learned about Course Hero when my lab partner submitted a paper we worked on, I was almost expelled. Knowing something takes effort even if you are handed the answers. You can't shortcut learning because knowledge isn't given it's earned.

That's right. It's like using a lever to lift that barbell isn't going to make you stronger. Training your brain requires effort, just like training your muscles.

I somewhat agree. Sadly, I find that of the degrees offered online, they mostly seem to be either the "underwater basket weaving" degrees or the "online marketing" degrees.

In what OECD countries do students go into crippling debt for their tertiary education? There are only two that I know of, one of which being the USA.

I don't think that the data doesn't really support your conclusion.

I would define "success" or "usefulness" on the basis of something measurable, such as average starting salaries for a given major.

Even if business degrees are "fake" subjects, I believe they have higher average outcomes/starting salaries than most humanities majors.

Seeing as outcome and job opportunities are the real thing that the customers (students) care about, it makes the most sense to look at the actual outcomes, using a measurable metric.

(I'm also interested in improving science)

The incentives (mostly via credit, but also social incentive) for regular college is already super-high... as is the incentive of colleges that receive this credit as payment.

You would need to overcome that with even bigger incentives... creating the same inflation problem, but now for trade schools. If you don't, trade schools have to compete with colleges funded by the ever increasing student loan complex.

Imagine a country that has a suburban housing policy similar to the college education policy. Contractors get subsidies, donations, grants. Buyers have access to easy, no money down, no question mortgages backed by a government. Prices inflate. Houses get bigger. A massive debt pool keeps growing.

You say: "this is really inefficient. Don't some of you want downtown apartments instead?" This isn't going to work while competing with the other housing system... no matter how reasonable the plan is. Throw in a stigma about apartment-dwellers... your plan is now doomed.

Unless students are paying out of pocket (student loan schemes don't count), then you need price controls.

Yea no more pesky English majors and philosophy students who bring up all sorts of annoying questions about the power structures that create our society. Can't we just stop thinking about stuff and get back to work!

I'm also hoping that CS will be transformed into something more useful, thinking about complexity theory is a waste of time (outside of helping us make good white boarding questions). We really need an army of CRUD engineers to do useful stuff. If you're learning about something that doesn't make someone else money, you're wasting everyone's time.

Thank god ML has learned to focus from the start on making things that make money. Only handful of whiny researchers complain about annoying things like "oooh we don't really understand how this works, we should understand foundations, blah blah".

But statisticians, oh boy, those academic nerds are the opposite of those ML folks. Always complaining that we aren't running A/B tests correct, and not accounting for confounding variables. All we need to know about stats is how to put results for a marketing experiment into a calculator and then tell the marketing director that the variant they like better is the winner. You can learn that in two weeks.

Brave new world with such people in it!

(bonus points to anyone who recognizes the work of Shakespeare both this post and parent reference).

Now imagine you remove that knowledge from the adults of your country. You remove that knowledge from heads of industry, community leaders, and voters. What kind of society are you left with? College needs to be expanded to all with an emphasis on the liberal arts, a high school education just isn’t good enough to produce a good society.

Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans, nothing will change. Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades. It is a problem of culture, not economics.

Source? I think most people view these jobs as the foundation of the American middle class. At least we do in the Midwest, where I grew up.

==Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades.==

Having a Harvard degree gives you higher earning potential than a career in the trades [1].

==It is a problem of culture, not economics.==

Oddly, all the jobs you mention are historically union jobs. Meanwhile, one side of the political aisle has attempted to weaken unions over the past 4 decades. If we want people to embrace union jobs, maybe we should embrace unions?

[1] https://www.scholarshipcare.com/average-income-of-harvard-un...

That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.

This is not unlike the required courses that predominate pre-major studies at a traditional university (in the U.S., at least)

If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.

I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.

Once you need a career it doesn't really work like that though, often you're working years as an apprentice in a specified trade before you can even think about branching out on your own.

If you switch trades you're back at the bottom with apprenticeships all over again.

Someone like an English major can much easily change careers as long as they're somewhat adjacent (e.g., copywriting, research, journalism, etc) and generally starts off at a higher salary depending on their degree level. Until you hit masters level most degrees are broad generalized education.

Trades are specializations. If you're unsure about which trade you want to get into, you'd likely be better served with a business degree (which is another generalized area of study)... at least that can be applied across trades. Many tradespeople struggle with the business side of things despite being very practiced at their trade.

You can start college at 20 as easily as at 18. The problem is that you get nothing for the two years (except, I suppose, you can work as an electrician to pay for college, instead of working at McDonalds).

I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.

There are art degrees, for artists, not people expecting to make well paying careers out of it.

I know my limits of what I can do. I can sew my own buttons, do a shitty hem on something that doesn't matter. Repairing the plumbing on a bathroom sink I did catastrophic damage too is towards my upper limit; I was able to source replacement material and do the labor myself, but I consider myself fortunate that I was able to do that with only a week without a bathroom sink. Also, don't tell my landlord but now I do have a plumber's wrench on hand.

So I go to the experts. The tailor, the seamstress, the plumber. "This broke, I messed up, you can fix it better, yes next Thursday after 4pm sounds fantastic."

Yes, I understand the pride in doing things yourself. I also see no shame in shooting up a flair.

My brother is 4 years younger than me, dropped out of high school, and makes a TON of money mowing lawns and doing pools and HVAC work in Florida.

That lifestyle ages you fast though. I have plenty of energy to be physically active after work and have no aches/pains to speak of. I wouldn't give that up for the money he makes. And that physical divide is only going to get bigger as we age.

But the trades also include indoor trades such as medical technicians and assistants.

My father didn’t want me to follow grandpa and be farmer or carpenter because it was a hard life. Most hvac, plumber, electricians I’ve known were following in family footsteps because it was lucrative and they were raised in it. It’s non-trivial to break into, physically demanding and years of apprenticing before you can go your own way.

It can be done, and there are great opps for those who can stick with it for 5 years. And like all trades, your market is growing because all the old guys are getting old.

http://sfelectricaltraining.org/

Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.

If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)

Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.

That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.

Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.

I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.

The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.

Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.

Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.

The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.

In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.

I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.

It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.

We even take the next step of referring those who point out racism as the actual racists.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin...

It's also not the case that a college education and massive debt go hand-in-hand. In most other Western countries college is either free or much less expensive.

Finally, I disagree that we should determine how "useful" a degree is based solely on its ability to help someone find a high-paying job. While it's certainly true that it's harder to find a job studying the humanities than STEM, perhaps we should consider why it is that our society places such a low value on these subjects?

Why? Class. Having a degree and having been to university is such a pre-requisite to being middle class here, far more so than money.

It is also a common problem that certain influential jobs preferentially recruit from certain schools; so people apply to Stanford as a prerequisite for Google just as they apply to École Nationale d'Administration if they want to be part of the French government.

Yes! People take "simple jobs" like hauling trash or cleaning sewers or welding pipes because it's stress free! Unlike those high-stress jobs at Facebook where you take the free party bus to the office, get free food, drink, gym, yoga, and massages, and even have internal message boards where you're encouraged to post about how horrible you're being treated. So stressful! I bet all of those 10xers at the FAANGS wish they could be maintenance workers.

For every person working at a FAANG you can probably find 1,000 working in a place with the same shitty working conditions most people are subjected to.

As a counter example cops can make $200k a year doing detail work (standing around) and retire with a pension after 20 years. There are similar situations (with lesser pay) for a lot of city and state level civil service.

There are shit jobs that will wear you down in every field. They're the jobs most people are working.

"How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?"

People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life.

The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.

The non-trade courses of study aren’t particularly popular with college students anymore. I don’t know many people with degrees in english or latin or history or philosophy. And the few that I do always planned to go to trade school (law school) so their undergrad course of study didn’t much matter.

Well good luck communicating with other people because is not how anyone else anywhere uses the word ‘trade’.

They’re not ‘trades’ they’re ‘professions’.

And I would guess you already know this and you’re trying to be contrary rather than you’re genuinely misunderstanding a basic word.

The software industry would benefit from moving in the direction of being either a "trade" without the manual labor, or toward being a real profession, but it currently occupies a weird middle ground.

Those are all things that are near-universally features of working a trade, so what exactly is the difference between a trade and a profession?

So I guess software development is just basically like bagging groceries. Totally informal.

I wouldn't believe the stories on candidates failing FizzBuzz until I saw it with my own eyes, several times!

I don’t think I’ve used the word outside of its definition:

> 3. b : the business or work in which one engages regularly : OCCUPATION

> 3. c : the persons engaged in an occupation, business, or industry

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trade

Have you never heard people make a distinction between tradespeople and professionals?

What do you think the words in this article mean? Are they completely new concepts to you?

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-man...

> A ‘profession’ historically meant the three learned professions of the Church, Medicine and the Law but today the term goes much wider and normally involves some substantial exercise of intellectual skill.

What is the distinction between a chef trained at a vocational school and a lawyer trained at a law school? Or a programmer trained at Stanford?

Chefs produce something tangible, you might say. Lawyers do, too. We draft briefs and contracts and court filings. Or maybe you’ll point out that a chef has learned a skill that takes a certain je ne sais quoi that cant be taught but can only be acquired with deliberate practice? I would say the same of programmers. (And attorneys, for that matter.) Coding is as much an art as it is a science.

And I don’t think the document you’ve linked excludes professional trades. Lawyers and doctors and programmers all provide a service:

> ‘Trade’ therefore takes its ordinary meaning, which normally involves commercial operations by a trader who provides goods or services to his or her customers in exchange for a reward.

One is considered by society to be a 'tradesperson', while the other is considered a 'professional'. Society considers law to not be a 'trade' because it is a 'profession' instead and society sees these as mutually exclusive by definition.

I think what you really mean is you don't agree with society's definitions. That's fine - it's an interesting discussion and I didn't express any opinion on it myself. But I don't think you were ever really mistaken about what the original comment meant - you were feigning confusion as a rhetorical device, which is why I think other people down-voted you.

Without that, a meeting of a profession is commonly called a conference.

You’re right there is a legitimate distinction, but maybe we should stop. It is 2020 and thinking you’re “better” than other people for relatively arbitrary reasons is passé.

The common factor turns out to be accountability. If the childminder falsely certifies an application, Ofsted will revoke her registration for dishonesty. A military officer will be cashiered. A teacher sacked and added to the barring list. So even those posts which are not 'professional' have enough consequences for acting falsely that the state relies on them to be honest.

I never seen anyone talk about medicine as a trade nor mean doctor when they said trade.

Yes, there are people today that wind up with college debt and don't have a correspondingly higher income to pay it off. But there are other solutions to address this problem, like lowering the costs of college to where they were just a couple of decades ago. Or perhaps changing the framework by which loans are made (e.g. if college loans were simply dismissible in bankruptcy, default rates would skyrocket and lenders would not be able to hand out such large sums of money so easily, and colleges would have to adapt by lowering their costs). And on average, people with degrees still earn more than those without, and enough more to pay off a loan over time. We should be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In a world where college is no longer normalized as the default option for a moderately ambitious 18-year-old, aren't we just reverting to how things worked for hundreds of years until quite recently? The kids from upper class families will continue to go to Ivy League schools, but kids from middle class and poorer families will be told from a young age that their path is to go to a trade school, or get an apprenticeship. College is too expensive and not worth it for them, so they won't even try. It just seems like a step backwards.

Lastly, I will admit I'm somewhat personally invested in this topic, and I take some offense at the idea of useless degrees. My partner grew up lower-middle class, neither of their parents went to college, but they took out a lot of money in loans and got an English Literature degree (which I believe is a commonly-agreed useless degree). If it had not been for the encouragement of teachers, and basically society at large that college is a good idea, they could have very easily not gone and just gotten an entry level job in their home town instead. Now they have a great, high-paying career in tech working in sales and operations. One very successful founder I worked for in the past had a philosophy degree (as did many other famous people in tech, like Reid Hoffman). Every job, but especially a job in sales or management/leadership, requires working with, understanding, and motivating other people. Many liberal arts degrees focus on exactly this.

Dismissing any degree outside of science, technology, or medicine as being as useless as "underwater basket weaving" is just absurd.

Many? Only ~10% of student loans are in delinquency. 90% of borrowers are making payments.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/topics/student-deb...

In my personal contact graph - every engineer I know who has graduated (even with C grades) has obtained a job and is happy with what they're doing. If they have loans, I am sure they're paying them off.

Only people I see having kids are those with strong, secure incomes, or those with no prospects at all. The cohort in the middle earning $40k to $120k doesn’t feel secure enough, or at least not until their 30s.

I'm not really understanding students who take on loans they cannot realistically pay back. Finding the salary and job prospects for various majors is a literally trivial google search away. How can one go through 4 years of college and never check this?

Actually this has been true for many decades, not just the last 10-20 years. The issue is exasperated due to massive unemployment because of the mismanagement of covid19.

There will be no 're-examining' because there is so much bloat that votes. Countless administrators that actually vote for their interests, at the expense of the students. It's systemic and just like police reform, it's not going to be an easy and fast change. When renovating the system, there are losers and those losers will fight you tooth and nail to prevent progress.

It's partly why I like creative models like Lambda School. There is a massive opportunities for business(es) to help fix this gap but...again, incentives are not static.

A business helping you get a high skilled job, might want cheaper labor, so they flood the market with more workers, which reduces the collective in that field.

In conclusion, these issues are massive/systemic. It's entrenched to society and protected by stakeholders. Effectively making change happen won't be easy and we may be creating a 'wake-a-mole' type environment where we solve today's problems and gain two problems tomorrow.

IMHO since removing the gold standard (1970s), this problem came up. I'm glad you have been able to but that possibility was shrinking every year. Less and less people were able to do what you did, starting in the 70s. Financial college administrators kept up with inflation whereas jobs didn't. Income didn't. Expenses took a little time to catch up with inflation as well. So, that might've been why for your situation. It wasn't extremely prohibitive but the issue compounds every year.

So, given the rising costs of Health Care and College both situations are good examples of this. The rising 'costs' are more people in administration. This could be blamed on regulation among other issues (greed).

As for voting in their self interests, I live in California now. University of California is the #1 employer in this State. This doesn't happen by chance. It happens due to stakeholders. Many people in this States want an 'easy' and 'stable' job. The easiest way to do this is require more red tape (regulation/'initiatives'/etc), in the name of 'progress' and then now you just created a 'stable and easy' job to make sure certain quotas are reach.

Professors and students lose out due to admin workers are more aggressive on making the government enrich their interests.

It’s a total game changer. It blows my mind how people can graduate with a degree and have no guarantee of any work experience. No idea how you turn that into a career.

It's not like it's hard for CS students to get internships in the summer...

And as you said, a significant part of the begining of the year simply covers what was done the previous year. I'd prefer they simply provided a summer curriculum of 2 or 3 hours a week of such work if review is necessary, which would also eliminate the complete discontinuity from one scho year to the next. I'm fortunate that We can do so on our own, piecing together that sort of thing, but plenty of working parents have neither the time, or ability, or inclination to compose their own mini summer curriculum.7

Jobs come from where the booms are. Unless there's an HVAC boom, why would you anticipate a surge in HVAC workers?

Not a criticism/denial of your larger point, just an observation about that point specifically.

This is the unfortunate part to me. I see a large amount of "not minimum wage, but not that great either" jobs require bachelors that the average person could probably do with a HS education, or jobs wanting advanced professional degrees that are paying pennies and probably don't require much more skills than from a bachelors or even associates programs.

And then there's a number of fields where highly skilled (and proven) individuals can't get the better job because they don't have the right degree.

The problem with "part of the population being disenfranchised" is that it includes the some of the parts/minorities that we officially care about (unlike, say, poor white boys in areas that vote for The Other Party).

If a solution can be found where these minorities can instead go and learn something actually useful, I'm all for burning the current university system to the ground.

I think it astounding how we humans are swayed in the information/meme/idea wind.

I'm a parent with children that are five, seven and nine.

I don't think this at all. Basically what happens is that I'm able to afford to pay tutors and nannies and therapists to help with schooling during the day, but most parents are not. This means my kids have a massive advantage that may never be caught up.

Things would be much worse if my children were in their final two years of high school, where college applications are going to be based on "performance" which basically means "did my parents have enough money to continue giving me a decent education when the state failed to do so".

At the same time, I'm also aware of what is happening from the other side of things. One of my children has fairly severe autism and is supposed to have a full-time para-educator assigned to them to help him cope with school. I say "supposed" because it's not happened yet (since late February/ early March) and looks very unlikely to happen for the school year coming in September, no matter how many people I harrass. I also want to add that they have an IEP that is legally binding, and failing to provide services is literally illegal, yet nothing has been done to help with this.

In my case, I (again, insane privilege levels here) can cause enough problems with lawyers and talking to school board members directly that my own son will hopefully be okay but I really worry about any child that has special needs right now and is being ignored or underserved because no one seems to make them a priority.

It's honestly heartbreaking. My son still sets his alarm clock every single day to get up for a school that doesn't exist. He doesn't understand why all of his teachers just stopped teaching him one day and he asks all the time when he will be able to go back.

Just imagine a seven year old autistic kid setting his own alarm and trying to make tomorrow be like the days he remembers. He doesn't understand that things have changed. He completely lost not just his teacher and support staff, but his private therapists and everyone else that he relied upon and that spent years convincing him they would be there to help him and that he should trust them.

The district expects him to be on a computer watching live instruction for 5.5 hours every day. He is seven. He can't manage twenty minutes. He needs someone full-time every day to help him stay on track and yet nothing has been provided and I strongly doubt anything will.

Again, I have backup plans involving hiring someone full-time to teach him. We are insanely, ridiculously lucky to be able to do this. My concern is for all of the other kids who don't have parents that can spend tens of thousands of dollars on teachers and lawyers to fight for their own children. It's so, so wrong that these children, the most vulnerable of all, are being so neglected by the system.

Fuck. That was a rant. My inclination is to delete everything I said here but I think it's important. This virus (and more importantly, the utterly inept, almost criminal lack of response and leadership) is causing enormous, potentially-permanent damage to many, many students, and the only kids that are going to improve are those with parents with plenty of money to shield them.

Although, that was during a time when that 1 year wasn’t just full of netflix (hopefully this is only very rare, and that most parents aren’t just having the young watch TV all day).