Parent of high school senior checking in. She’s absolutely switched, pragmatic, good grades, good test scores, and been practicing art seriously since she could pick up a crayon. I can afford it but it will still be beaucoup expensive to send her to a 4 year private University in LA to do digital animation without debt. Will she greatly improve her skills and have a lot of opportunities to work or intern in this field - yes! Do I think she could just go on her own to Hollywood now and be a successful animator - no, no and hell no!
That said, both the students and the Universities need to be more transparent and coach on the realistic graduating salary ranges of majors. If you’re a poor student, it probably doesn’t make sense to get that really interesting art history major if that means racking up $200k in debt vs getting an accounting degree with an art history minor.
IMHO the biggest issue with University costs has roots in State Legislatures cutting budgets. Then the schools, such as the University of California system, started increasing the acceptance of out of state or out of country students to help bridge the gap, thus forcing in state students to go out of state. Negative feedback loop. Great State Universities at “affordable” prices helps to keep the overall higher education system in check. This is now broken.
Me too. I have a bachelors in Philosophy (full scholarship, so no debt from it.)
I’ve never used the degree. While I was still in college, my husband* and I bought our first house, which we flipped and made a bunch of money on. I’ve been in construction/investment real estate since. Give me a pile of construction materials, and I can design and build a house, from the foundation to the electrical system. Construction work is fun and fulfilling if you’re working for yourself. I know lots of people who are quite well off working in the trades.
If we had kids, I wouldn’t be pushing them toward college, unless they had a very specific career path in mind that required it.
I recommend college to my children, simply because I believe there are a significant amount of “HR Screeners” who don’t really know much about the positions they are filling, that s__t-can applications from people without any degree. They do that, because they can.
I can’t prove that my communications degree (which has almost nothing to do with my career) has either gotten me, or not gotten me an interview, or a job. People have asked about it in interviews, though, so I figure it probably plays some sort of factor in a hiring decision.
I, however, am not pressuring any of children. One of my kids went to community college and dropped out a couple courses short of an associates degree. I have no doubt that this has something to do with maturity and work ethic (I didn’t graduate from the first school I went to either, I was a bit of a late bloomer). I certainly am not going to brow beat him into finishing, though I think it’s a bit of a shame.
My daughter has seen my son’s failure and decided to pass. That doesn’t make me happy, but she seems a little aimless as far as her interests go. I definitely wouldn’t want to push her to go and then have her change her major 5 times.
I definitely, would always recommend getting a STEM related degree, as I think that is pretty marketable, and pays well. As long as you are interested in STEM, and only then.
If you are just fine making sandwiches for a living (both my older kids are doing that at the moment), then yeah, no college necessary.
A graduate with a science degree asks “Why does it work?”
A graduate with an engineering degree asks “How does it work?” :dubious:
A graduate with a business degree asks “How do we make it work economically?”
A graduate with a liberal arts degree asks “Do you want fries with that?” :o
I really hate the idea that college is career prep. College is for learning; learning is good. (It’s probably worth noting here that I have an undergrad degree from an elite liberal arts university and a Ph.D.)
I have a teenager who is not particularly academically motivated. He may very well want to work as a plumber or whatever. That’s fine. However, I want him to go to college first, learn stuff along the way, develop the social networks, have some fun, have an experience living away from home without having to be entirely independent, all that. I’ll pay for it, because I think it’s important. I don’t care what he studies.
What about people who, despite having the ability to do well, find college excruciating? Our older son is in that category. For now he wants to try to make it on his own without college. If he decides to go back he should be a lot more motivated after a few years of dull jobs and crappy apartments. I needed college because I lacked the aptitude for the skilled trades.
Let’s take a calculus class. When I was a freshman in the fall of 2000, dinosaurs roamed the earth and we bought a $100 textbook from the university book store. Then we did problems from that textbook on notebook paper. Using pencils, if you can believe that. We physically handed in our homework at the end of class, and the graders graded it with red pens. We took quizzes and tests on paper with pencils as well. During lectures, the professors wrote on the board with chalk.
Today many calculus classes have online assignments. Grading is automatic, done by software, not by a person. Tests and quizzes are moving online as well. Lectures often involve video segments or computer animations of key points. Students often turn to Khan Academy or things like that outside of class, even if they aren’t being used in class.
So sooner or later, every intelligent student surely has to start asking the obvious question. If my homework, my tests, my quizzes, and my lectures are all digital and available online, why should I take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to live on this campus and attend classes? Why should I pay for professors with 6-figure salaries and a mob of administrators who don’t do anything, when online options are available?
Of course, there is one obvious answer. The traditional 4-year, on-campus experience allows for plenty of drinking, partying, sex, football, movies, concerts, etc… Some students may stay on campus mainly for that stuff and not consider the debt question very much. (Ages 17-21 are not peak years for rational planning.) So perhaps the more relevant question is whether middle-class parents will ever collectively put their feet down and declare that enough is enough.
I find value in the experience of having an actual directed course, managed by experts who are paid to answer questions you have about what you are doing, and with compulsory benchmarks that you have to hit. It’s useful enough that I can’t see physical in-person education disappearing any time soon.
I’ve gone back to Uni this year to do a masters-by-coursework - so, higher level than an undergraduate or “college” degree (I put that in quotes because I don’t really have a good feeling how closely American College <=> British or Australian University map to each other. I suppose that they’re close enough). But it’s still essentially lectures, assignments, exams just like any other non-hands-on higher education.
The lectures are all recorded and put online, so in theory I *could *just stay home and watch the videos, but I don’t because it’s just not as good. And Khan Academy won’t force you to complete the worksheet by 5pm on Monday or else you drop 5 points in your year’s assessment, nor will it facilitate your meeting up, in person, with other people who are studying the same things at the same time (discussion boards are also a thing that could in theory fulfil the need … but are just not as good). Even though Khan Academy is very good, and the lecturers have in fact directed us to some Khan Academy modules to fill in any gaps in our former education.
So … yeah, students do do a lot of sex, drugs and partying, but if you’re serious about your study and LIKE what you’re studying it’s not all about the sex, drugs and partying. And “an online course is just as good” is something I seriously disagree with
I never understood that attitude. If you want to be a doctor, you need to go to medical school. If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school. Engineers and accountants study engineering and accounting. So on and so forth. Going to an “elite liberal arts university” to “learn” just seems to me a luxury reserved for people who don’t really need to figure out how they will earn a living after college.
More than that. There is a growing dichotomy of “winner” and “loser” colleges. Harvard is arguably the top, but it’s really the top 50 or so elite schools. In some cases, it may be as few as the top 10. In many cases, these are schools where one can get an “elite liberal arts university” and then land a job in a new hire training program at an investment bank, tech firm or Fortune 500 company that puts them on a management track.
I think the more pertinent question is “when will the government stop promoting college education with financial incentives?”
Guaranteed, subsidized, amortizing, forgiveness, loans, etc. are one of the biggest causes of rising tuition, which has what made a college education for those who really desire it almost unattainable. With such high demand, colleges and universities have responded by raising tuition costs that makes hyper inflation in less developed countries seem mild.
You miss the point. if I go get a degree in mechanical engineering, I should be expected to have learned the principles of mechanical engineering. not “how to design a car door.” That is something to be learned on the job.
It’s actually more urgent than this. The thing people don’t realize is that today’s tradesman is tomorrow’s business owner.
I have worked with about 100 small manufacturing businesses. Every single one was started by, and usually still owned by, a tradesman. Not some; not most; all. Tradespeople are NOT put to work by rich folks who just have a lot of money, not are they put to work by MBAs. They are always put to work in businesses sstarted by some guy who used to be a welder/fitter/machinist etc., got an idea, scraped up some money, and twenty years later he has 80 employees. Every single machine shop I ever worked with was started by a machinist. Every fabrication shop was started by a welder. Every assembly shop was started by an electrician or a fitter or a machine builder. I never saw an exception, not once, across years of experience in industry and a really good data sample. I saw factories in Canada and the US, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and every single one was started by a tradesperson.
The lack of tradespeople today, and it’s a very severe one, absolutely means that in 2040 we are going to start lacking the companies themselves. Today’s companies will in some cases last because they’re handed down or bought from the retiring owners by savvy businesspeople, but there won’t be the startups needed to create new, growing trades businesses. At that point it will not be good enough to send more kids to trade school, because we’ll be lacking the organization ability to put them in jobs in competitive businesses at all. The organizing and innovative influence of having a mass of talent in a given industry isn’t easily fixed.
Yes, I still don’t get your point. All the subjects I mentioned are extremely broad fields. Not “how to design a car door” subjects. But if you want to design car doors (or some other part of the car), you will typically need to be educated in mechanical engineering (or perhaps some sort of creative field if you are designing the aesthetics and not the mechanics).
I studied civil engineering in college. In addition to “how to design a bridge / building” classes, I also learned about wastewater and sewage treatment systems, mechanical systems, an elective on coastal engineering and other classes specific to civil engineering. Those classes were built on a foundation of mathematics, physics, chemistry, English, project management, economics and computer science. I also studied electives in history, the arts, social psychology and other topics of interest.
Ultimately I changed careers shortly after graduation, but the computer science, math, project management and other knowledge I gained is still extremely relevant to my current career.
And that’s not even getting into the socialization and networking aspects of my school or the “that’s a really good school” factor when I meet people in a business context.
That’s awesome if you can afford it. But is that experience worth a minimum of $20k for a year of college - which he may fail since he’s not academically motivated and won’t enjoy the classwork (although the experience is great)?
I feel the same way - but my non-academically minded kid decided on trade school and living at home. He didn’t want that experience and I didn’t push something he didn’t want - because he would have slept through his classes and played a lot of XBox and drank a lot of beer
However, I’m paying $40k a year for my daughter to go to college starting next year. And I don’t care if she ends up with a History or Poli Sci degree (those are my bets). I want her to learn. I have money set aside for college, there won’t be any loans - and yes, its a luxury that she doesn’t need to major in Accounting or Engineering. But its something we’ve valued for our kids since they were little - more than dance lessons or traveling sports or new cars or granite countertops in our kitchen. We’ve been well employed, and have lived fairly frugal lives. My son doesn’t value that - and thats fine, he is a hard worker and he doesn’t need to reflect our values - especially the ones as subjective as this.
Traditionally, the elite who went to liberal arts schools and learned for the sake of learning fully expected to go to graduate school–to be a doctor or lawyer or MBA or something.
Going back to vocational school, I always worry about the jump from having a community college certificate to actual employment. I feel like every tradesman I know is in a family business–that the real path to a job as a welder or plumber or electrician is to know someone–a family member or a family friend–who gets you into an apprentice situation (formal or otherwise), and you learn as you work. I always feel like the job certs from community colleges are not taken nearly as seriously in building trades. But that’s a very vague impression. Is it really possible for a kid who has no trade experience or connection–never held a tool in his life, doesn’t know anyone in the trades–to go to the local community college, take classes for a couple years, and upon graduation be offered jobs in those fields?
Or a PhD and a professor. I have a few friends whose fathers were college professors - and the trust funds subsidized the low paying college professor job Or work in non-profit fields - another place where the trust fund subsidized the low paying job and the liberal arts degree and elite family connections got you the job.
Absolutely - in my son’s sheet metal program, they were hiring straight from the classroom. He switched to HVAC, one of the HVAC companies in town is hiring them before they finish their certificate and giving them on the job training. Trade schools (depending on the trade) often have 90% placement upon graduation in the field.
While I’ve worked with too many vocationally-oriented people whose lack of appreciation for the value of cultural and philosophical knowledge evidences as a definite limitation of their view of the world and often causes them to hold opinions based upon a very selective collection of ‘facts’ that deliberate exclude anything outside of their domain of knowledge, the value of education strictly for the sake of being ‘educated’ is a kind of luxury for the independently well-off, and without being tempered by some kind of practical experience and knowledge of the world is basically just an affectation.
Being able to quote Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is a nice parlour trick, but unless you’ve actually had some experience of looking into the abyss of existence you won’t understand either philosopher’s statements about the infinite qualitiative distance or the abyss staring back at you, and so, such an education is largely lost on all but the most precocious of students. In our culture, we’ve become convinced that everyone (or at least, all of the ‘smart’ students) needs this education and needs it right after completing secondary education, resulting in a raft of people whose most valuable skill is being able to reconize quotations by source. Worse yet are all of the people who major in ‘business’, which is literally just filling up four years of partying and hopefully useful networking with some ostensible coursework with virtually no relevance to any actual work and no intellectual substance.
Not everyone is going to be a STEM major, or a lawyer, or a doctor, and as tiresome as they can often be at parties, we need philosophers and Russian literature majors but we don’t need all that many of them. We do need people who can actually do the real work of maintaining infrastructure and building things, and while some of that slack can be taken up in automation there will be a need for skilled tradespeople for the foreseeable future because doing a complex job like pipefitting or wiring a building are not skills that are readily amenible to automation the way assembly line processes are. And as RickJay points out, these are actually the backbone of small business, doing contract work that no one will pay a mass labor force to be available on cue to do. We’ve denegrated the value of these jobs and the people who work them which is an attitude that is already costing us in both capability and actual money, as in when you can’t get an electrician for two weeks because they’re all booked up your business gets shut down or you pay triple-time to get priority. And there are people being encouraged to go to four year college and grind away at a McJob who could be highly motivated and enthused to be carpenters or millwrights if the job were viewed as not being somehow lower in status on the cultural totem pole.
I went to a STEM-focused university, and they had a pretty sizable arts and humanities department, and regardless of what technical major you were there fore (architecture, CE, EE, ME, etc.) you had to take a good chunk of humanities course (both mandated and elective.) We spent plenty of time poring over Apologia, The Stranger, Metamorphosis, Things Fall Apart, and so on. Including religious works like the Bible and Qu’ran, though from a literary focus and not dogmatic. And they were most emphatically not blow-off classes. in fact, if you wanted to (and a number of people did) it didn’t add that much more time until graduation for you to add a minor in Humanities/Arts & Sciences.
Yes, absolutely. The school I went to worked closely with local businesses and our courses were thought of as something like a pre-apprenticeship. You’re learning valuable skills that give you a huge leg up for getting a job or a real apprenticeship. Our programs also involved 6-9 weeks of on the job experience and we all ended up with little portfolios of written recommendations, ratings in various categories, and whatever certifications we obtained as kind of a boost for applying for jobs. It was a huge benefit considering most of us were still in our late teens with little or no work experience otherwise.
Around here, at least, you can also find general job listings for apprenticeship programs and even the local utility company is helping to sponsor kids that want to get into a trade. There really is a lot of trade work out there, it just isn’t talked about nearly as much as a white collar career path.
Or work in non-profit fields - another place where the trust fund subsidized the low paying job and the liberal arts degree and elite family connections got you the job.