As an example of what I’m suggesting, look at Title IX, “No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
I don’t know about other places, but the class size at MIT is very close to what it was when I went there 50 years ago. And there are probably twice as many kids competing for those slots.
I saw resumes from new grads, and they were so much smarter than I was it was depressing.
The other issue is how easy it is to apply. I typed my applications, and my high school had a limit of 3 plus CUNY. With standardized applications and efiling, it is easy to apply to lots of places if your parents have the money.
The obvious solution is to make colleges bigger, so they grow with the population. Which means more professors, dorms, and classrooms. And if they colleges are losing money on each student, making it up with donations and grants, this isn’t going to be fiscally possible.
However I found this with a quick Google
The earnings gap between college graduates and those with less education continues to widen. Today, Millennials with a high school diploma earn 62 percent of what the typical college graduate earns. In 2019, median income for recent graduates reached $44,000 a year for bachelor’s degree holders aged 22–27.
Yeah, there are plenty of high school only people who do well, but the numbers say getting a college degree is well worth it.
We sent ours to a small private liberal arts college because we felt it was the best place for them…but we also could afford it. And that isn’t necessarily fair, but life isn’t. At a SPLC they get smaller classes and more one on one time with professors, which is ideal for them. It isn’t about networking, its about the experience…it also isn’t fair that at 21 they have been to three continents, that they drive a car their parents bought (used, but a car) or that before they graduated from high school they lost three people they were close to - one to cancer, two to suicide. But they aren’t at a highly selective school - that would be the WRONG fit for them.
Except the public assistance private colleges get is in funding research via grants - it isn’t an education program or activity. And, as Ruken points out, financial aid is given to the student.
And yet the federal government is able to use Title IX to force colleges to change. Why is that?
But is the overall population growing, or does it just look that way, because the same population is applying to more schools?
I.e., if it used to be that 100 students just applied to Harvard and 100 just applied to Yale, and now 200 students apply to both Harvard and Yale, neither Harvard nor Yale needs to get any bigger.
These days, more than before, colleges are getting more international applicants, particularly from China and India. So yes, the applicant pool is much larger.
I wasn’t talking about fairness or your family at all. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I just meant that these co-workers apparently didn’t see that they themselves didn’t get the networking benefits that they thought their children would get from going to a private college* - and if they couldn’t see that, I don’t know that talking about people who did go to Yale and don’t make a zillion dollars is going to matter.
- and that was all they talked about - nothing about it being a better fit or even the experience. Just about being able to get better jobs because of the networking and that someone would be taking loans to pay for it because it was a good investment.
Well, just in general the population has grown, so unless a smaller % of the population is a]lying, the pool is growing.
Also, colleges recruit a lot more aggressively these days. Kids get buried in mail, both snail and electronic. They get cheerful texts from outreach offi especially. Their social media feed is all colleges. A lot of this is soliciting applications from kids don’t have a chance, but at the end of the day, they are also getting more applications from qualified kids who wouldn’t have dreamed of applying a generation ago.
‘College graduates’ as an aggregate is a useless statistic, because the difference between faculties is huge. They are averaging the salaries of a graduate Petroleum Engineer or Comp Sci graduate with other, less lucrative faculties to come up with a ‘typical college graduate’.
There are quite a few college degrees that have lower starting salaries for graduates than the average for high school graduates who didn’t go to college. If you get a degree in Psychology, or Visual Arts, or Communications, or English Lit, or any of the ‘studies’, your best hope for a career is starting as a junior office assistant or HR or perhaps as a school counselor if you are lucky. Pychology is one of the most over-subscribed majors, with many more graduates than there are jobs.
When comparing college grads with people who didn’t go to college, you also have to consider that the person who got the degree has shown a certain amount of intelligence and drive that might have resulted in an equally good job had they not gone to college at all.
Also, most college degree starting positions will not pay as well as a trade like plumbing, or electrical work, or heavy duty mechanic, or many other trades. Most of these trades are short of workers and getting a job is easy if you are certified.
Finally, when considering the difference in lifetime earnings you have to look not just at the difference in annual salary, but the money it cost to go to college, the money not earned while in college instead of working, and the cost of paying back student loans. Not just the money, but often the opportunities it robs you of, such as the ability to buy a house or start a family when young or move to where the jobs are.
Take two people of equal ability. One goes to college and takes Psychology, while the other decides to apprentice as an electrician. The second person starts earning an income immediately. In four years, the electrician will have work experience, savings, perhaps already started a family, and earning on average around $28/hr in the U.S. The person who got a degree in Psychology comes out with no job experience, $50,000-$100,000 in debt, and gets a job as a counselor with an average starting salary of $18/hr. The electrician is in a position to buy a house, the Psych grad has no chance and will be paying off debt for a decade or more.
By the time they are both 30, the electrician could be well on her way to a very comfortable middle class life, with health benefits and a pension, and with a home that is accruing value. The psychologist is still living in an apartment, earning peanuts and paying off school debt.
And that’s if they are lucky. When I was in college I worked part-time at Radio Shack to pay my way. One of my co-workers was a full-time employee with a Masters in English Literature. Radio Shack was the best he could do with that degree.
If it’s anything like other elite schools, the number of kids competing for those slots is probably more than twice what it was 50 years ago. Harvard has about 12,000 applicants in 1990, and just over 40,000 in 2020. Georgia Tech had just under 6,000 applicants in 1990, and almost 40,000 in 2020.
According to the MIT site, last year they had just over 20,000 applicants for about 1,400 places.
Well first of all, basic demographics suggest that there will be more applicants. The United States population has grown from 205 million to almost 330 million in the last 50 years. Even with declining birth rates, that’s a lot of kids, and as other in this thread have pointed out, technology like the internet has made people afar more knowledgeable about elite schools and the applications process, and far more likely to apply.
The numbers I cited above suggest that its not just a slightly larger pool of applicants all applying to the same two or three elite colleges. All of the elite schools get massively more applicants than they used to, they accept a much lower percentage, and not very many students are turning down the opportunities.
If you look at the admission stats for a lot of elite colleges, they list not only how many applicants they get, and how many students they admit, but they also list how many students are offered a place on the wait list, and how many students are admitted from the wait list. For many of the top colleges, the numbers of students admitted from the wait list are very small, suggesting that there aren’t a lot of successful applicants who turn down one elite school in order to attend another. Last year, MIT admitted zero applicants from its wait list, suggesting that basically everyone who was offered a place took it.
I understand that the “college-age” population is declining, at least in some areas.
I don’t think colleges extend offers to the exact number of students they can take. At least at the school in which I worked in the admissions office they made more offers than they had seats. They were betting they would have x% decline the offer. That x% varied by department.
Many departments did not take a single student from the waitlist. But it was not because no one rejected the offer. It was because the predicted percentage or fewer rejected the offer.
You might be interested in the Wyoming college system: 6 or 7 community colleges around the state that act as feeder schools to the one four-year university. All the cc’s have open enrollment–no minimum GPA required. And CC tuition is cheap: under $5k for tuition and fees per academic year. Everyone gets a chance, and the instructors are good, even excellent. My daughter spent a lot less on college because she got a scholarship from a good local CC. (She’d been accepted by some big-name schools but was determined to avoid a huge student loan.) She got an excellent foundation for the big OOS university she transferred to.
But there are big drawbacks. Even UW doesn’t accept all cc credits, and out-of-state schools definitely don’t. If the U isn’t the right pick for a kid–it wasn’t for either of mine–they HAVE to go out-of-state and pay OOS tuition. (There are no private colleges.) And most students have to move hundreds of miles in order to go to the U, not easy for non-trad cc students with families. The cc’s spend a lot of money and energy trying to retain students with low HS GPA’s , and still most of them drop out.
I’m going to push back on this no-out-of-state-students idea, too. An important part of the college experience is getting the viewpoints of people with very different backgrounds than yours. The cc where I once taught (as an adjunct) and which my daughter later attended had a sizable foreign student population as well as out-of-state students. Having a diverse student population makes for a better, richer college experience.
Also, to be clear, states fund only about half of the costs of instruction at state schools. As state legislatures slashed funding, schools increased tuition and cut staff. It wasn’t pretty.
I’ve always thought California’s system was pretty sound as well. Not flawless, but a solid framework.
Where are you getting that $50-100K number? As we’ve been discussing in a concurrent thread, the average college student loan debt per borrower is something like $32K, and the median debt amount is $17K.
It’s not that undergraduate student loan debt can’t go as high as the figures you mention (indeed, it can go even higher). But the average student doesn’t end up owing anywhere near that amount, and AFAICT psychology majors are not more indebted than the average.
But again, the average Masters’ degree holder in English literature isn’t working at Radio Shack. Individual anecdotes don’t prove anything about general trends; for example, I know an electrician who’s nowhere near as well off as your imaginary electrician in your hypothetical. You need to provide representative data, preferably with cites, if you want your numbers and claims to be believed.
The term for this is “yield”: the % of accepted students who enroll. A second number, “melt”, measures the % of enrolled students who do not attend (like they take a slot on another waitlist, or attend no college, for whatever reason).
Yield is a publically available number. Schools like to show as high a yield as possible, which is why “demonstrated interest” is a big thing in admissions. Schools track visits, emails to admissions officers with questions, even whether students open promotional emails to decide who is serious about attending. There’s also a thing called “yield protection”, where overqualified students are rejected because the school thinks there is no chance such a qualified student will attend. (for what it’s worth, I think most of the time kids who get rejected comfort themselves with the idea that they were “yield protected” a lot more than it actually happens).
Anyway, there are lots of “good” schools with a very low yield rate. So yes, they offer vastly more spots than they actually have.
I don’t think we used the term yield 30 years ago, but yes, this is exactly what I am taking about. I was just a work-study guy, so had little visibility to decision making, just listened like a fly on the wall while I was making copies and filing away.
When my youngest was dead set on the college they are at their Sophomore year, when they applied their Senior year we did everything we could to “demonstrate interest” - EA application, attended webinars. We’d done a school visit already. We sent an email early on to the admissions counselor for the region asking some questions, and a follow up after the application was submitted, emphasising their desire. Now, their school is merely “selective” - but that still means good applicants don’t make the cut.
Part of the game is knowing the game. Which is where students who have advisors like you and the staff you work with, or who have coaches, have a huge advantage over kids who go to schools where staff and parents don’t know the game.
(My kids college is one with low yield, which causes issues. Tuition is pretty reasonable for a selective East Coast school and their aid is pretty generous. So they’ve started to see a higher yield, leading to housing issues.)