We had a thread on this already. It seems all companies have to do to get workers is to increase their pay. And while there are some jobs going begging, there aren’t 3.5 million.
Correct, our head of security (VP-level, salary over $200k, total comp over $400k) is a lawyer, has never worked as a guard or even a supervisor. The guy he replaced six years ago did not got to college after high school, but after working almost 20 years as a guard, supervisor and manager (of over 100 people) he went to night school for a BA in criminal justice on the company dime. Was with us for 42 years.
Our company is unusual in that we have over 1000 security (mostly guards) employees. We do not use security companies except for very temporary needs. Don’t know how long that is going to last.
Ah, to be clear my father never was a top security guard. He moved around the organization, and his lack of degree never seemed to hurt him.
Refusing to vote to promote Russian spies who never showed up or did anything, that hurt him.
Oh yes, I was just giving another example of someone who rose through the ranks in the 1960s-80s of n a way that just isn’t as possible these days. More and more middle management positions are filled with people who have no experience in the jobs they are supervising.
First thing: High Schools need to teach the difference between average, median, and mode. And some basic economics about present versus future value of money. That would end a lot of the arguments about salaries.
Back to the topic: A “trophy college” should have classes for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Don’t waste resources teaching boilerplate freshman classes. Leave the freshman year to community colleges and let them wash out the students who really should pursue other career paths. (Foreign students might have to be handled differently in terms of what they have for a community college.)
Also, consider how many people have been working from home, who might have never been offered the possibility if it weren’t forced upon their companies by the disruption of the pandemic. Now – what needs to be disrupted in the college class paradigm?
I apparently posted a hit-and-run back when this thread was active. Sorry. I’m not going to try to backtrack all that (but thank you @Dangerosa for the UMN descriptions.)
re: scholarships – someone was dismissive of these, I think @Sam_Stone. Price reductions come in different forms. As do costs. Relevant here is net cost, which includes fees, room, board, but also scholarship and grants (if you’re from a poor family and attend Yale, you likely don’t have a scholarship knocking your net cost to near-zero – you have grants.)
The net price for first-time full-time in-state students at public four-year colleges is $15k. $19.5k if you estimate book, supplies, transportation, and other personal expenses. At four-year non-profit schools, it’s $29k and $32k, respectively.
So I don’t think the $100k number being bandied is outrageous. Obviously YMMV.
Note: The net prices do not consider opportunity costs, e.g. foregone income.
Somewhat separate, I’m cautious about the college wage premium. If income is correlated with intelligence, drive, and grit after controlling for other factors, and if going to and succeeding in college is also correlated with these factors, then we’re not making a like comparison when comparing wages of people with an without a college degree. An average premium of $X is not the same as saying the average person will earn $X more if they go to college. But I haven’t seen this addressed adequately to know if it’s a real issue or not.
Net price citation:
I seem to recall learning the difference between those more than once in school. Either the public school system I went through in Texas was truly exceptional, or merely teaching people about such things is not enough to change how they engage with the world on such subjects. Or at least not enough to ensure they will absorb the lesson and know when/how to apply it.
The thing about those prices, though, is that they are heavily needs tested. So while the average net price in an in-state school might be 15k, a kid eligible for Pell Grants will not pay so much, and a kid who is not will pay more.
Furthermore, a kid has to live and eat regardless. A portion of that $15k is room and board, and that would have to be paid by someone, anyway. While some kids could live at home, others can’t. And even if we ignore the cost of housing, a kid at home adds significantly to utilities and the grocery bill.
For a poor, relatively bright kid who qualifies for Pell grant and merit aid, going to college can be a financial boon for the family, as they lose one of the people crowding their home and a mouth to feed.
While cost housing doesn’t go down unless the parents downsize or (if they own) rent the room out and marginal utilities are piffle, food is a good catch and good to factor that the equation. $2000-$4600/year, per USDA.
Or more succinctly:
But yeah it’s probably worth spelling out for the folks who see sticker prices and assumes that’s it. The College Board has a net price calculator (I can’t vouch for the accuracy) somewhere. My old link doesn’t work. Anyone turned off from even applying somewhere with a high sticker price should look into what it is likely to actually cost.
Housing isn’t always that simple. Some kids really can’t stay at home. It’s already too crowded, or a grandparent needs to move in. For others, parents aren’t wiling to let them stay, or insist they pay rent if they do.
It also may just be worth some value to the parents to have a kid move out. That may be part of what they are paying for when they help fund college. It’s not valueless.
Also, in terms of “YMMV”, it’s important that your millage varies in a strong correlation to your income. It’s not random.
. . .
If by “trophy” colleges you mean top rated ones, freshman year is hardly boilerplate classes. I’m not sure that many community colleges teach differential equations. Even boilerplate classes like physics are not going to be the same at a top school versus a community college.
Plus most community colleges are non-residential - delaying moving out a year is not going to wash students out.
Community colleges are great for many things, but they are not the same as a top four year school.
But it’s an interesting proposal, bringing the “trophy college” model more in line with many European universities. AIUI the British “college”, for example, is more like the American “community college”, serving as either a preliminary to or a substitute for a graduate degree.
However, I agree with Voyager that an elite “trophy college” could have a hard time bridging the gap caused by elimination of first-year courses. Maybe the idea is just to accept only very high-achieving students who have basically covered the first year of a competitive college curriculum by the end of high school anyway.
I don’t think you understand how the selective-college model works. First of all, as @Voyager points out, one of the perks of going to a selective school is that the curriculum is often more interesting in itself – e.g., they might offer writing-intensive freshman seminars on a variety of topics instead of freshman comp – and in any case your classmates are going to be stronger students. This is a big part of why the experience is valuable! Unless your community college has a very strong honors program, most of the classes there are likely to be geared to the lowest common denominator of students. This is fine for students who genuinely do need extra help, but the brightest and most academically ambitious students are going to be bored.
Also, “washing out students who really should pursue other career paths” is not something that selective schools need community colleges to do. They are very, very good – maybe a little too good – at weeding students out at admissions. Anyone who is actually admitted to a highly selective university is capable of graduating (barring some sort of mental health or life crisis, and even then, those schools have lots of resources to help students through it), so their graduation rates hover around 90%.
Finally, “Don’t waste resources teaching boilerplate freshman classes” doesn’t really make sense, given the economics of how the university works. From the student’s point of view, it might make sense not to spend a year of tuition money if the student can get a comparable experience at a community college and then transfer, but from the college’s point of view, no “waste of resources” exists. Freshman psych in a big lecture hall is a cash cow for the college! If it didn’t exist, tuition would have to be higher to subsidize the upper-level classes, which tend to be smaller, have more specialized requirements in terms of equipment and facilities, and (often) more likely to be taught by full-time faculty rather than graduate students or adjuncts.
Could this be from early tracking and binning of students, which is done far more than Europe than here. My son-in-law, who is German, got put into a vocational path as a young teenager, and after he matured he had to fight his way into a real university.
But if people go to a community college for a year before going to Oxford and Cambridge, I’ve never heard of it.
Excellent point. My observation was that flunking out of MIT was fairly difficult to achieve. I knew someone who was miserable at his major, and people there intervened to make sure he switched to one he was better at. The biggest problem I saw was with kids who were so far ahead of the rest of their high school class that they had not learned to study as well as necessary. They all graduated, but some had bumps on the road. And Harvard was famous for grade inflation, which comes in part from the idea that anyone smart enough to get in deserves an A or a B unless they put in little effort.
Even aside of the academic rigor of community college classes (and there are some community colleges that offer some excellent academic programs), one of the problems with trying to knock out “the basics” at a 2-year school is that “the basics” vary by university and by major within the university. It doesn’t do the student much good to take a statistics class at a community college if what they really needed was calculus.
I see a lot of students who enroll with 30, 45 or even 60 or more hours through high school dual credit and community college coursework who think they’ll walk in the door as a university junior, only to find out a lot of those hours won’t transfer or will only count toward elective credit.
I don’t think so. I have no problem with scholarships.
To build on this: fewer than 20% of students who enroll at a community College the Fall after graduating from HS ever get a 4 year degree.
CC sounds great on paper and they are often full of dedicated individuals, but there are deep structural problems that they generally aren’t resourced to solve. They also aren’t nearly as cheap as they used to be: it’s quite possible, once all the financial aid shakes out, to be able to find a kid a place at a 4 year school, including room and board, for not much more than a CC would have been (especially because, as mentioned above, room and board have to be paid in some way anyway). And the chance of graduating in 4 years is generally much, much higher (though institutions vary and you should check).