If only Huey Lewis could record a song proposing the opposite…
Are you sure it was degreed RNs and not diploma RNs who had to settle for those nursing home jobs , because I think that was right around the time where degree programs were replacing hospital nursing school diploma programs and I’m sure that made things difficult for the last of the diploma program graduates.
Ah, sorry.
I think a lot of that is only true up to college age, and maybe past that in certain demographics. In the college-going demographic, going to college is expected, so not really considered nerdy or uncool.
And really… after college, your “coolness”, if there is such a thing for grownups, is mostly determined by income, and college tends to be the way to higher paying jobs.
You make it sound like being a policy wonk is uncool, but being a high paid lawyer isn’t, as if somehow being a high-paid lawyer doesn’t require similar or more education and work than being a policy wonk.
I’d also argue that a lot of this is 30 years out of date; with the advent of high paying tech careers in the mid-late 90s, being a nerd has become a mainstream thing, and what used to be kind of a closeted thing with nerd culture has now gone mainstream as well. The highest grossing movies are science-fiction and comic book related, for God’s sake! It used to be that you didn’t get nerdier than that.
Now maybe there are socio-economic demographics that still feel this way, and that’s unfortunate. But it’s also not something the government can change or that’s really its problem either. If those demographics want to believe going to school and working hard at academics is nerdy or unmanly, let them have their low paid, manly jobs. Not my problem, and I’d resent tax money going toward remedying that sort of dumb-assery.
I’d be interested in knowing the wrinkles of the study mentioned above, in which about half of college students got better at thinking in their first two years of college. Why are the results this way?
Theories:
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College just isn’t very effective at making people think better.
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No matter what you do, only about half of all people will be better thinkers when they’re 20 compared to when they’re 18.
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Certain colleges rock at making kids think better, other colleges suck at it.
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Certain disciplines rock at making kids think better, other disciplines suck at it.
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Students entering college are a lot likelier to take a test like this (that is, one unrelated to grades) seriously, compared to students in their third year.
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The test measures the kind of thinking that some disciplines teach and not others; specifically, about half of US college kids are enrolled in the disciplines that teach what this test assesses.
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The test isn’t very good at assessing thinking skills.
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Something else.
I taught for many years in the Cal State system. Speaking from experience, I would say about a fifth of the students had a very “high school” attitude toward their education. It wasn’t a majority, but it was a significant minority. That’s factoring out people who were not interested in my class because it was a breadth requirement, whose lack of interest might be expected.
When I taught at a Jesuit private university, there were only a few with this mentality, mostly quite privileged people who were going to land on their feet no matter what.
People expect to GO to university, but how they engage and interact with it is very definitely culturally determined. I have also, over the decades, seen shifts in student cultures and attitudes. Today’s students, in my experience, are much more emotionally intelligent than past generations, but deeply and profoundly ignorant of basic history (or rather, they know specific aspects just fine, but the overall pattern eludes them). They are also, as a cohort, rather depressed about the future, and like the OP are not sure that there is any point to what they are doing, which affects their engagement. Again, as a whole: myriad exceptions.
I believe very strongly in education: I see that it works on most people, and makes their lives better. It often takes people a couple of years to find their feet in university, and a lot of what I saw in the Cal State system was people who had transferred from junior colleges, which I think are a great idea in theory but in practice are overcrowded and under-rigorous. I also really like students: even the ones who aren’t sure why they are there, who don’t trust instructors to educate them, and who don’t care about the material, they still bring something to the table, and get something out of it.
I’d think that #2 is a huge part of it. People mature a lot when they go to college, and I would expect that increases in critical thinking would be part of that.
I’d also like to see whether or not someone’s “distance from home”, meaning how on their own they are, not literal geographic distance, has any effect on things. I know that leaving home and truly living on your own was a huge game changer for me in how I viewed the world and how I interacted with things. Suddenly I was primarily responsible for almost everything, and being able to think and plan took on a whole new emphasis. I would wonder if the students who go to college, but have mom & dad pay for everything really ever “launch” in that sense. I knew plenty of people who still got spending money, cars/gas paid for, and everything else by their parents during college. They were always a bit more immature in a lot of ways than the rest of us.
Maybe. I’d like to see evidence.
is this the oft-noted “advertising problem,” to wit, “I know half of my advertising budget is completely wasted, but we can’t tell which half?” Does that mean you should slash the budget/universities in half?
I’m not sure of anything from forty years ago 
. However this was coming from nursing students pursuing degrees at a state university. I wouldn’t doubt it might have been slightly exaggerated take on the situation they were seeing in their internships. I imagine as always there was a bit of a hierarchy with say on average new UCLA graduates out-competing CSU graduates who were out-competing community college graduates with just an AS in turn for the better paying/more interesting positions. But I definitely recall a little nervousness over what kind of job they could get vs getting a job at all.
Not to be too nitpicky, but I’m less skeptical about education per se than the college experience as the vastly superior form of it over trades education as the default position. Specifically in the context of very uncertain times for many of the middle class jobs that a college degree has been a required credential for, and less uncertain times for careers in certain trades. Adding in of course the hyperinflation of obtaining that credential.
Even something generally worthwhile isn’t worthwhile at any price.
The context had been from a thread in which I was very much pointing out the difficulties the broad group of not college educated have in our country. Not just men, just increasingly more men. The knee jerk response to that is to wonder about how to increase rates of college education. I wonder if the better response is to make sure that there are paths to careers that are actually going to be there are available as an option. That means much more attention on expanding that pipeline than has been, and a bit of marketing getting past the tendency, seen here frankly, many who are educated have to look down their noses at those without higher education.
FWIW we are doing a major kitchen redo and I was talking to the plumber today. He bemoans that the shop classes he took in High School are gone now. But also argues that some people just have aptitudes or don’t. His son wanted to join him in plumbing and just didn’t have the aptitude for it. I didn’t ask what he is doing. He is having a hard time finding apprentices, and but has one now. Smart guy. Pretty sure a good neighbor! 
I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong, I’ve been wrong many times before. I remember when DARPA did a self driving challenge in 2005, the self driving cars did far far better than they did in 2004. People saw all the progress and felt things were moving along rapidly, but now we are in 2026 and self driving is still very fenced and has trouble dealing with things like rainstorms and pretty much anything unexpected.
To me though, humans aren’t getting better. our brains and bodies aren’t getting any better while machine brains and bodies are rapidly advancing. Eventually they will surpass us, and go far beyond biological brains and bodies. When that happens, there won’t be much left for us to do, the same way the internal combustion engine replaced the horse.
But I disagree that humans will be cheaper than bipedal robots. In a hospital, a bipedal robot can work 24/7, which would replace the wages of 4 full time workers. So if it replaces 4 employees making 80k a year, that is 320k a year in wages it replaces. Modern bipedal robots are far less than that. Even if a bipedal robot cost a million dollars, it would pay for itself in 3-4 years or so when you factor in maintenance and electricity.
Mine’s all anecdotal from being an RA in college for four years, and noticing that most (not all!) freshmen matured quite a bit from September to June, and basically largely went from kids to adults in a lot of ways. And most of it was likely not physical maturing, but more mental maturing.
Going off on a hijack but NOT separating out for higher education or not … different cognitive functions have different age peaks through adulthood. See figure 1 as the best one thing to look at.
There are also studies showing ongoing changes in white and grey matter throughout adulthood if anyone is interested.
@Wesley_Clark brought up the political aspect of the issue. Relevant to that I share this gift link:
Neither party, they said, was speaking to their concerns.
Since Mr. Trump’s victory, Democrats have begun to focus in earnest on bringing young men back into the fold, raising the alarm over various indicators that they are floundering: Men are graduating from college at declining rates and are 10 percentage points less likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than women; their median hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower today among the working class than it was 50 years ago; and they account for about 70 percent of what are called “deaths of despair” — deaths from suicide or overdose.
Still, with a midterm election this fall and another presidential contest steadily approaching, many young men said their political allegiance remained entirely up for grabs. …
… Dylan Pfaffenbach, 21, a Republican student leader at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis., pointed to an NBC poll he read about last year, which found that “having children” and “being married” were among the most important definitions of success for young men who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.
Winning this group back IS possible but trying to entice them to college is not the message or the effective policy.
They want to be able to partner and have kids. They need the economic security a career provides to do that. Be the party that offers a vision to get there with a real means of getting an education that does that effectively. To all genders of course but recognize that the opportunity and what it means for their desires is going to resonate with this demographic meaningfully.
If you really want to win over working class men and give them a good living, getting them into labor unions is a highly effective way to do it. Men who are in labor unions make better wages and get better benefits, and they also vote democratic more often compared to non union members.
The root cause is structural economic inequality. All the wealth goes to the top, and home owners don’t want new homes built since that would decrease their home equity. Neither party wants to change those things.
Trade unions are among the strongest ones around with huge memberships and lots of power. They basically control the apprenticeship pipeline (and are coming around to opening it up more) … Less so for residential workers than commercial ones though.
You want non college educated workers in unions? Get them into trades.
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the growth experienced in university is outside the classroom: (1) being on one’s own, which doesn’t require enrolment anywhere, and tons of face-to-face exposure to a lot of other bright people from various different backgrounds and sets of life experience, which is harder to come by but not impossible. Edit: oh yeah, and a safe space to fail a bunch of times without wrecking your life.
Spending the same amount of money to travel the world for two years would probably accomplish as much or more for skill growth, but is a tougher sell on the job market. The military provides a lot of this experience, as well, and is easier to sell to employers, though for me personally the concomitant mastery of violence is a real negative.
I am already on board with the idea that being sorted into the college peer group has major consequences (not all good but definitely not all bad).
This bit I am less sure of.
I think there is less exposure to those various backgrounds and experiences than we’d like, less than even the university’s diversity demographics give impression of. Once in the big campus many students end up self segregating in various ways. By political leaning, by race, religion, social class, specific field of study. The exposure may be pretty superficial, in the same cafeteria line, sitting in the same lecture hall. Sometimes diversity on a college campus is like that Escher print Relativity of people walking through the same space oriented in different dimensions and not interacting at all. Especially at bigger universities.
I didn’t self-segregate in university.