Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
(nbcnews.com)489 points by jnord 4 days ago
489 points by jnord 4 days ago
There's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US.
From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.
There is an actually easy an effective escape hatch right here in the US:
Community college to state school path.
You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.
And that's before any scholarships or grants.
Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.
Even though the end result is exactly the same.
A degree from the "right" college surely helps for certain firms? Sure, it must be a small number of top ones as most can't afford to be that choosy about their candidates.
Whether that is a sensible strategy for the firm (a candidate bias towards those who can pay the top college fees) is another question.
In those cases the sensible strategy for students/parents is to get most of the degree in the local college and then move to a prestigious college at the very end of one's studies.
That is probably not true if you are transferring from a community college after two years. It's entering as a freshman direct from high school that has all the barriers.
I can vouch for studying abroad. But can you get loans and scholarships for it as easily as studying at home? Even if the university is free you must pay for food and housing.
The university is the signal. Studying at Stanford or MIT gives you a better (professional) future in the US, while the average American doesn't know universities such as the L'École polytechnique, UNAM, or UBA exist. They will clearly hire from the top US ranked ones.
> There's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US.
I mean, good luck finding a job in the US when your degree is not from the us (or maybe Canada). Most industries don't hire folks with overseas degrees.
> Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.
They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.
I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.
So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
Correct.
It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."
Some schools are $100k/year for room, board, and tuition, and yet those expensive schools are very much optional. It's a red herring to point them out.
There are still affordable schools. And staying in a dorm with expensive room and board remains optional at many institutions. Heck, some people still live with their parents.
The state school I went to is still just around $10k/year tuition, and I got a broad education that opened many doors for me. (I was in the humanities, but there are very good science programs there as well.)
Of course it's crazy to sink $400k into a degree for most people. And for many, many people, it is completely un-necessary! You can still get a relatively affordable 4 year degree.
As far as the data goes, adjusted for inflation, tuition and fees have eased up in the last ~5 years [1]. But overall, college enrollment has been going down anyway [2], except for 2025, where it hints at a slight rebound.
So I'd say we have to consider the full set of drivers that can correlate: overall rising cost of living making it very expensive to be at a university full-time, general labor market sentiment which is mostly down since covid, interest rates and debt risk which are still high despite recent cuts, etc.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...
Better than asking "is college worth the cost," and getting into ROI calculations per major is asking "could we provide a similar (or better) educational and social experience at a fraction of the cost"? To that the answer is yes.
Many (most?) people go to college primarily for the piece of paper, not for the educational and social experience.
And resultingly, if you do go to college and immerse yourself in the educational experience, you come out with superpowers compared to your peers.
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job
I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.
Which strongly suggests that one reason 4-year degrees have lost value, is the piece of paper has lost value. Because of (most?) people only getting a degree for the paper.
Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.
And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.
For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.
For just one slice of education, to start.
As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.
Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
That doesn't have prestige value. Prestige comes from scarcity and the ability to exclude the lower caste.
If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.
> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost
This isn’t socially useful.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
I think most people (namely high school seniors) go to college for neither. They go because that was the expectation, and was assumed to be at least approximately productive path.
While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.
I agree the answer is “yes”. But I think people are also forgetting that the reason college was a useful thing to pay for, was it was effective in differentiating between someone who was highly capable and someone who wasn’t. In a world where anyone can get a degree by simply spending enough time and money, there’s no real differentiation happening. Even if someone gets a degree, their fundamental competency (I guess I’m talking about something like IQ) is going to be whatever it is. And so it’s going to be hard to find jobs and the perceived value goes down.
If you want to make money, go and train to be a plumber.
If you're a kid and you want to be making money (or at least a comfortable living) in 20 year's time, become a farrier.
Because we are going to be ploughing with horses again soon, the way things are going. And even if we're not, a horse needs shod every couple of months and costs a couple of hundred every time.
I've never seen a hungry-looking farrier or scrap metal dealer.
Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko...
Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
Sure sure, there's the love of learning and the formation of the well-rounded modern individual, but most people are much more pragmatic than that.
They need to get in, get the piece of paper for the least effort, get a job. Everything they need can be taught on the job or asked to ChatGPT most likely anyway.
A Case Against Education https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
>Is this not rational behavior?
If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure.
If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up another person on reddit scratching your head wondering why these mean companies just don't want to give you your $125k software dev job.
Obviously, you don't need a degree to learn enough to convince me that you'll be a productive member of our team (or at least good enough in the short term and productive after a few months). But in my experience, the ones who half ass and ChatGPT their way through college are almost never brilliant polymaths. In my experience as a student years back and my experience interviewing graduates now, those students breezed through their courses and sought out more challenging learning opportunities such as accelerated graduate courses, impressive work within student organizations (for example, winning CTFs competitions with their school's computer security group), etc. And that all shows up on resumes and in interviews in a way that's night and day vs the ones who got tricked into thinking that the only purpose of an education is to get a paper.
I'm with you. In their position I did the most of the educational opportunity I had, but then I didn't live in a world where people told me my job would soon cease to exist thanks to Claude and I spent every waking out flipping through short form videos. I can't relate to what that does to you.
This is part of the reason I make this point online. People need to understand that there are jobs available if you do the work to make yourself valuable, especially if you aren't demanding high compensated FAANG roles right out the gate. It's just that if you learn absolutely nothing and will be hired to do shit work for a year or two until you become baseline competent and will just leave as soon as you can pass FAANG interviews, companies would rather just pay people in developing countries like India or Colombia. They'll do bad work and, in the case that they do turn out to be great, leave to make more money. But at least they cost 5x less (the US system of employer covered healthcase isn't helping our workers' competitiveness in this either!)
> If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?
The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.
I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.
> Is this not rational behavior?
Yes, and it is also demonstrated by the Flynn Effect. [1]
About "A Case Against Education": Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society’s top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability.
Yep, meet as many people as you can who might later give you a job or ask you to join their startup. Meet a potential spouse, you're in the same social class, about the same age, probably similar interests. You are alumni of the same institution. Do sports, drink beers, learn social skills.
Total cost of ownership is 4 years x $15k-$25k (for a cheap public school) + missed income from working that same four years ($35k x 4 years). This is equal to $220k +/- $20k of lost money.
Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.
My math comes out to the college grad is still making more money despite the initial sunk cost.
Anecdotally my wife came very close to finishing a 4 year degree but ultimately did not for various reasons (she comes from a very disadvantaged family...) and not having one has been a major burden or blocker for her pursuing all kinds of jobs. I am hoping to help her finish, but it is hard to restart later in life and lots of past credits will probably be lost or not count anymore due to various academic bureaucracy roadblocks.
Yep, I've seen this with a lot of my friends who did a similar thing. HR employees screening you out alone is a huge problem.
I have some middle and upper middle class gen X and older friends giving their children TERRIBLE advice about how degrees aren't worth it anymore and you get more out of getting started in your career ASAP than spending 4 years in school. The problem is that a BS now is like a high school diploma when they grew up, and if you don't have one, then in all likelihood, you will struggle to not be downwardly mobile, as it's the new middle class gatekeeping tool.
People should NOT listen to anyone over 45-50 or so who tells them college isn't necessary. Those people grew up in a world that no longer exists.
Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
> knock out core credits in community college
The correct way to do it is to utilize high school dual credit or dual enrollment offerings. Then you can shave off a year or two of college but still be eligible for freshman scholarships. Often cheaper than community college too.
>Another example of bad gen X / boomer advice is to knock out core credits in community college and transfer to university later. They don't understand that your only shot at getting significant scholarships and financial aid is when you enter as a 1st time freshman. I know someone with brilliant kids who made National Merit Scholar this year who is already setting their kids aims low by advising them to do this when there are so many good universities, both private and state, where their kids have a good shot at getting a full ride.
I'll have to push back on this. I'll give NJ as an example but other states have similar systems. In NJ If you are in the top 15% of your graduating school you are covered for full tuition provided for the first two years at community college. You are also given a guaranteed spot at whatever public college/program you want. (EDIT: I am not sure if this is still the case im trying to sift through the documentation but now I think it may also require minimum GPA in CC) Imagine getting that university degree and starting your professional career with potentially 0 debt.
Furthermore a variation of this program extends to families making less than 65k. If you meet that criteria. The community college degree is 0$. From there you are given a course schedule that if you follow will transfer 1:1 to a university and if you do well academically there you can be eligible for reduced or waived tuition at the public college of your choosing. This system helps people who did poorly in high school or just didnt make the cut aid wise get a second chance at tuition free college.
If you make more than 65k, you still get reduced tuition on some sliding scale. And again excellent grades translates to more savings.
At least for NJ, Community college really sets many people up for an excellent start in their career by not having any college debt.
And the opposite is true as well. I had a friend who had no idea how to market her labor, uncomfortable even with the idea of making a linkedin profile. She has an undergraduate degree, she did eventually find something, but it was a tiresome process. On the other hand, I had just finished a Master's degree, I had made up a linkedin profile to apply to a startup I thought looked interesting--no response, but, about a month later a recruiter messaged me on linkedin to work a short term contract that turned into the job I have now. There was practically no effort on my part for a job search.
Have you verified that these "academic bureaucracy roadblocks" exist? Surprisingly, I was able to pick my studies back up after almost 20 years, and not only were all of my existing credits counted, but they also exempted me from new requirements that had been added in the subsequent 20 years.
This assumes that every college grad is guaranteed a decent starting income. It seems that on average new grads are struggling more now than they used to to get jobs in their fields, especially higher paying jobs. And that perception is probably magnified by internet horror stories such as every 3rd post on r/cscareers.
Yes this kind of math doesn’t make sense in places and industries where pay is not high and job prospects are difficult. Like liberal arts. Or third world countries.
And that is the point: do the math that assesses the incomes correctly and many people won’t see as college as sensible for those professions.
The 43 years of career is debatable. I got a CS degree in 1997 and worked for 18 years (non consecutively), but have been out of work now for several years. It's quite possible those 18 are the entirety of the earnings I will derive from my CS degree. And people today have AI pressures I didn't have. Makes the math quite a bit different.
The numbers look very different for a private school, which could run up to $100k for tuition, room, and board. It is almost unimaginable that attending a private college could have a positive expected value at that cost. For one thing, the incoming students will typically have stellar credentials and abilities. This means that they would not have the average outcome of a high school grad who gets no further education.
If I were faced with spending $100k/yr for my kid to go to college, I would strongly consider offering 5 tranches of $50,000 that we would together invest in business ideas over the next 5 years. Humanities and social sciences could be learned in parallel, while trying to launch businesses that bring value to the world.
The lessons learned would not be the same as those one learns in college, and the social aspects would be very different/lacking. This would clearly not work for all teenagers, but for some, it could be a much better opportunity and use of funds.
People who can afford themselves going to private schools have a reason why they prefer spending 100ks vs less. Prestige schools gets you a prestige job so "It is almost unimaginable that attending a private college could have a positive expected value at that cost" isn't necessarily true.
The thing is, prestige and cost do not go hand in hand. The most expensive schools are not the most prestigious. I think Vanderbilt was the first school to hit the ignominious milestone of $100,000/yr, and they're not Ivy League, Ivy+, or perhaps even Ivy++ (if such a classification existed).
Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. MAYBE you’re making that in software (good luck getting your foot in the door).
Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?
I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
>Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption.
It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.
Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.
You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.
Your numbers seem to be a couple years out of date, or maybe you're (no offense) living in an economic backwater like Florida where salaries are severely depressed due to the tourism effect.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...
> like Florida
If Florida is "backwater", then so is most of the rest of the country outside of a handful of overpriced cities where earning 80k is required to be able to afford a room in an apartment - not the whole apartment, and certainly not buying one.
What if you fail for whatever reason and don't finish college? Then you spent a bunch of time and money for essentially no benefit.
College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.
The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.
> Now compare this to income differential. Starting grad income is $80k(?). At 4% raise per year compared to 3.5% raise per year for a non-college employee. Over 43 years.
I would not assume earning that much for 43 years.
Are you assuming $55k salary differential? ($80k for starting graduate vs $35k for non-graduate)? That seems a bit high.
what would a more reasonable ratio be? I consider someone without a degree 15 years later making the same as a college grad right out of school. though at 3.5% that would come out to $58,000.
So yeah the numbers are not the most rational. $60k would be more reasonable for a college grad.
I went to uni to learn to learn. It helped that it was free, but it was a rigorous education with formal proofs (starting in week 1), proper research, scientific writing etc. Very few people will learn that outside universities, and, while not strictly needed for most jobs, it really helps as a tool to shut 'talkers' up to this day. Socially it was good as well; got my first and second project for my tiny company I set up in uni from the father's of two study mates: the first project was 100k, the second 1.6m (both guilders at time), so there is that; I would have never known these people otherwise.
It seems mainly to be about cost, as opposed to opportunity. College tuition inflation is insane.
When it came time for me, I couldn’t even come close to affording college (in 1981). Long story, but there were many challenges to address.
I didn’t want to accept financial support from my family (see “long story,” above), but I did let them co-sign a government-backed student loan for $6,000, for a two-year, full-time trade school (which seemed outrageously expensive, back then).
Took ten years to repay, but I never regretted it.
As the article says, this change in opinion has been very big and very recent. Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
I see several possible reactions. One is to do what Georgia Tech and U Texas are doing -- to offer online degrees for MUCH reduced cost, like $10k. Will such 30 credit MS degree programs (that don't require BS first) replace 120 credit BS degrees? That makes a lot of sense to me.
The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost and the need to retrain often as AI automation changes the employment picture rapidly and unpredictably.
> Don't expect universities to sit still and do nothing.
> The popularity of residential degree programs may be ending, due to insanely high cost.
I think the problem is that universities _have_ been changing in the direction of _delivering less_ at the same time that they cost more. The article cites public schools doubling tuition in inflation-adjusted terms since 1995, but simultaneously:
- student-faulty ratios have gotten worse
- schools use under-paid adjuncts for a larger share of classes
- good schools often trade on the research record of faculty, but the success of those prominent faculty often mean they can get course buyouts / releases, so they're not teaching anyway
- much has been published about administrative bloat in universities but for example see 2010 vs 2021 numbers here https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
Rather than trying to make new online offerings, I think schools need to lean out their staff, and cut back on programs that don't have to do with instruction. Even better would be if federal funding eligibility was tied to schools demonstrating that at least X% of their budget goes to instruction, where that X should ratchet up over time.
No, if anything the article has a copyedit error in saying twice in one sentence that the doubling is after inflation-adjustment.
> While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995.
Dedicated grad schools that are separate from, but affiliated with, dedicated undergrad schools. Those teaching at the dedicated undergrad schools will be hired for their ability to focus on foundational teaching, with research programs designed to involve undergraduate student researchers in genuine research, while still providing publication opportunities and genuine advancement of the art.
I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.
Having taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a different name.
Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.
"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance.
One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.
Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.
The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
Only because that's what college has become. I loved studying my field for four years, free of most of the vicissitudes of life that would otherwise prevent me from being able to focus on an education. I guarantee you a lot of people would like to get a degree simply for the sake of learning, and to become a better person. Hell, I'd take a few classes if it didn't cost like $800 per credit hour. This whole "college as job training" thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and none of the innocent people subjected to it are particularly happy with the situation. They are not, crucially, in a position to change that.
I also studied something I found fascinating, but I also had friends that I still talk to and meet up with today. Its both possible to enjoy your studies and have a social life.
reason (3) is social signaling.
elite schools aren't only desirable because they set you up with big opportunities. they are the way for high-school overachievers to signal to everybody how smart and good they are.
elite schools could probably make bank if they just sold a stamp-of-approval from their admissions committees that just said "you are smart enough to get admitted, but were not lucky enough to win the lottery of being given a seat".
100%, but it's even worse than that. "X got into Stanford" is the new "X is a Stanford graduate" because of grade dilution - and admissions dilution has soured even the former.
There was a user here a few months ago trying to promote his startup. He was being somewhat obnoxious when people offered criticism so I looked him up and found he was some 21 year old kid. Profile read:
> Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders.
> Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council.
> Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF.
The dropout thing struck me because it was such an obvious attempt to try to appear to be the Mark Zuckerberg style figure that this kid desperately wanted others to believe he was. I’ve been seeing a ton of these kids claiming to have had exits before they even graduated high school, and even though I know they’re lying, I’ve been browsing here long enough that I would probably have believed them if I hadn’t picked up on it being a social media trend.
> Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity.
I believe the primary reason is to attain credentials in pursuit of access to more lucrative employment prospects. I think your 1 and 2 are both significant factors, but they are quite far behind the pursuit of credentials.
some of the students just really don't want to live with their parents anymore. Going to college is the most socially accepted way of doing that.
Meanwhile, China is churning out STEM graduates at breakneck pace. Sure, not every single one is Nobel prize material, but 7 mainland China universities are now in Times' top 100, and another 5 Hong Kong ones as well.
I’m still heavily subscribed to the idea that global access to social media ruined the kids’ expectations. Everything else is downstream effects of unrealized expectations.
In Chinese/Japanese cultures, role models and parental influence on education is still pretty huge. Japan is changing a bit, but I think school systems are still strict enough to keep it up. China is still a beast of its own.
I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
The problem is that no one can really articulate what the point of higher education is.
If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.
If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.
If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?
If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.
No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...
The problem is the funneling of dispassionate kids into college who just pick something and then game their way as much as possible to that piece of paper.
Employers want passionate and self-motivated workers, instead they have gotten a mountain of applicants who routinely forget everything they crammed the moment the test is over.
Universities survived half a millenium being networking grounds for the upper class, and they will survive another millenium being networking grounds for the upper class
The last century will be a mere footnote in a case study of folly, where 100% of the university's problems came from dealing with the underclass at all with a side helping of federal funny money. It will be comedic relief amongst starry eyed business majors, waiting to satisfy a condition of their trust fund
The employment sector's decision to require degrees is mere happenstance and something that sector will need to reconcile on its own.
Someone should turn that comment into a Twilight Zone episode...
We wake up tomorrow to a world where universities never existed.
No cultivation of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein...
So we're stuck mostly with 1000 year old technology.
Maybe, just maybe, universities shouldn't cost a fortune?..
Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications? I can see why those in h1b’d industries like cs don’t see any point, and those are the industries where the most jobs and money have historically been. As goes the STEM labor market so goes the market for stuff like accounting, communications, sociology. A fair and secure labor market is a necessary condition for higher education to pay off. American workers compete for jobs with a global workforce, therefore American universities must be cost competitive with those in India, China, etc…. Tenure is like tarrifs, the cost of protectionism is paid by the consumer.
I work for a small Us-based med-tech company that is growing. We are paring down our offshore devs and hiring only US based devs now. I can assure you that if you have a good school on your resume it puts you at the top of the list. All things being equal, if you went to University of Vermont (like I did) and and someone else when to Harvard, you better believe I'm interviewing the Harvard kid first.
>Why pay to get a degree in the US when you are competing for jobs not based on merit or qualifications?
This is one of those things that people just say and while of course there are issues with our current system, this provably false and patently absurd. Do you not do a technical interview for new devs? You don't check their merit or qualifications? You just do a lottery? It's frustrating to hear comments like this because it reeks of people thinking they're so smart while ignoring reality.
Qualifications are easily and frequently faked and most people who write code for a living have seen competent people replaced by low cost semi-competents who excel at getting hired but little else. Interviews have gotten much more onerous, but the average level of skill has not increased.
IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
Most of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so?
Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
Yeah that’s true. But a paid education doesn’t provide too much motivation anyway. College education is stuffed with unnecessary courses not everyone needs but you have to take anyway.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
I didn’t take a single unnecessary course.
The course I took on Literature of the Apocalypse, in fall of 1999, is probably one you would say is unnecessary. It has proven quite valuable as I learned how to read a lot, a lot more quickly. I learned how to write quickly as well. I also learned a lot about an important aspect of our cultural and political context, as western society is dominated by doomsday cults (especially the atheistic ones, everyone’s got a utopia they are trying to sell in order to get you to sacrifice your life for them).
That's true, but without that piece of paper you're not getting past the hiring filters to even hope of landing an interview to showcase your skills to even get the lowest entry level job that's not flipping burgers. A college degree is the new high school degree.
They're wonderful but, yes, the cost is out of control.
Higher education delivers a fantastic ROI for the country as a whole. The people who benefit most from a strong economy are the wealthy. So tax them more. And put that money towards lowering the cost of education. Win-win-win.
I feel the same fallacies happen with money and degrees:
- People with more money live better lives, so let's just print/hand out money and everyone will live a better life!
- People with college degrees live better lives, so let's just push more people through college and everyone will live better lives!
In both cases, of course, completely missing the underlying reasons money/college degrees provide(d) better lives.
It's hard to believe that any single person in government truly thinks printing money will increase resources or that more easily handing out college degrees will automatically make everyone better off. So I don't fully understand how this happens, perhaps pandering to the electorate.
It's a prime example of the tragedy of the commons and there's honestly not much that can be done because of how competition on the supply side of the labor market works; for employers, a degree is no longer a differentiator among candidates.
Consider the contraposition.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".
Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".
I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.
The difference is that printing money creates more money, but doesn't create any more stuff. College degrees (theoretically) create more educated people. If you just "hand out" degrees, that doesn't happen, but if you actually teach people, then it does.
I agree with you.
The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.
Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.
> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Told by who?
Educated people are the way they are due to a particular personality that they have. They are curious and self driven. Many educated people have no formal education. You cannot teach a personality.
That's not to say other personalities are less worthwhile... It's just that we have emphasized one kind of personality as the ultimate one and then are surprised that -- after maxing out opportunities for those already suited towards that personality -- a saturation point is reached and future effort has marginal gains.
What's wonderful about comprehensive universities is that there's a program that can excite the interest of almost every personality.
And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.
The good news it that you don't need to hand out money or degrees. See, some people have an inordinate, obscene amount of money, and they would be able to lead full, happy, fulfilling lives if some of that money went to help people who have very little. Because if you're making $30,000 per year working at a gas station, and you lose that income, you're basically screwed. But if you make millions of dollars every year, you won't really miss a small portion of that. You'll be just fine.
So you just need to sort of move wealth around such that it is less egregiously unequal. Oh, and states can fund universities like they did a few decades ago. :) Win-win! Poorer people get to participate more freely in society, with more opportunities, and you don't have to print any extra money.
The 4-year college isn’t a bad system but it has been asked to do a job for which it wasn’t intended. Many people just want an opportunity to develop useful skills within the context of a modern corporate business. Modern corporate businesses want a way to filter and sort potential employees for skills and readiness.
The four-year college isn’t good at either of these as it wasn’t intended for this. I don’t think the trade school model is quite right for this (there’s lots of soft skills to be learned) but it’s closer than the 4-year.
My theory is public state schools will become much more prestigious, as non extremely rich kids will find spending $75k on tuition to just not be worth it when you can go to your local state flagship for a fraction of the price. Plus, most of the most prestigious schools in other countries are public schools (e.g. UT and UBC in Canada, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK).
As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.
Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.
Because they are not. If I was 18 years old right now, I'd be going into a trade of some sort. No debt, immediately earning a decent amount of money. AI will push even more kids towards this route.
I'm Irish. The state paid me to go to university, and I've paid it back many times over in taxes.
Whenever I hear about the cost of degrees in the US I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
It doesn't make sense, it's entirely inhumane and predatory to loan that kind of money to a teenager, and there's no way I would ever have gotten a degree if I lived there.
I tried being in debt once, for a far more modest amount than a US degree, and it weighed on my subconscious the entire time.
Almost nobody seem to see college as a place where people can develop the skills to learn itself? Did it get that bad?
It doesn't matter that I didn't remember how to do real analysis, but I had that class, and I learned it at some point, the process itself is exactly what happens in work - we'll learn new things, use it for some time, and then almost forget it to learn the next thing.
It doesn't have to be college, but there are a lot less opportunity, freedom and guidance to do so elsewhere.
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
I’d feel better about not recommending college for everybody if our high schools were more rigorous. I personally feel that the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curricula should be the minimum for high schoolers to graduate, since an education at this level provides well-rounded knowledge that gives students the skills necessary to survive in a 21st-century developed economy.
However, many high school students don’t have the opportunity to take such classes, and there are also many high school students who struggled in elementary and middle school.
I was a high school student in California during the first half of the 2000s. California used to have the High School Exit Exam, which was mandatory to graduate from high school. The test focused on English grammar, reading comprehension, and algebra. I took the exam in 10th grade, and I felt it was easy. So easy, in fact, that I believed eighth graders shouldn’t have much difficulty passing the exam.
However, there were many students who weren’t able to pass the exam, even with multiple attempts. Eventually the state got rid of the test. I don’t know if educational outcomes improved in the immediate aftermath, but UC San Diego’s study on remedial math shows that our high schools are inadequate at preparing students not only for college, but for life in our modern economy.
Of course, to fix high schools, we also need to fix our elementary and middle schools. This goes beyond the classroom; this also involves addressing the cost-of-living crisis. It’s hard for kids to thrive in school when they have parents who need to work heroic hours to make ends meet, and this doesn’t include the kids who have to deal with homelessness and other unstable living situations.
Maybe one thing to keep in mind is that there are a big range of colleges in the US. If you go to a poorly regarded party school then probably you have a good time and maybe even get some useful connections out of it, but the main advantage is presumably being able to check the ‘college degree’ box when applying to relatively ordinary jobs. If you go to Harvard then (a) you pay much less if you have limited means and (b) your future prospects are probably significantly better from the experience (this is a bit complicated – a lot of the good outcomes are due to capable and ambitious inputs so the direct benefit of the degree is more limited).
It is easy to read something about one subset of universities while subconsciously thinking of a different subset (eg all universities vs well-known / highly regarded / similar ones to your own).
When some survey says that people no longer see the value in the degree, it obviously doesn’t mean that no college is worth it.
Another thing: a lot of recent wage growth was in the lower end of the income distribution so better alternatives is part of the decreased desirability of college.
The signalling hypothesis (of Bryan Caplan [1]) lurks within your two premises. Neither the poorly regarded party school nor Harvard add much in the way of human capital. What both do is act as honest signals of intelligence, ability, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness (including family resources). These are extremely valuable indicators for prospective employers who are otherwise prohibited (by law) from asking or testing these directly and punished (through wasted wages, training costs, benefits) for making a mistake.
In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
I certainly learned a lot of mathematics at university that I probably wouldn’t have learned without it. Perhaps more importantly was some amount of mathematical maturity. The former has probably not been that useful in my career (idk maybe some linear algebra?) and the latter maybe a little bit, but if one were trying to figure out the optimal things to learn for my job, they probably wouldn’t have been what I studied.
There is nothing a college can teach you that you cannot learn for free online. The social environment can be replicated for free. You're not paying six figures for an education, you're paying six figures for exactly two things:
1. Someone to write lesson plans for you
2. A piece of paper that tells the world you are capable of conforming with the sometimes-frustrating impositions of an institution for 4 years without making too much of a fuss in the process
What you need is the exams! Maybe $1000 to sit a bunch of paper or computer based exams in a hall. Teach yourself beforehand.
Colleges need to figure out how to advertise those benefits, and the colleges' role in providing the benefits. The fact that they've been flat-footed for a decade tells me either (1) they're incredibly bad communicators, or (2) they don't really believe their own claims.
But in the long term it seems to destroy the ability to self-learn; the vast majority of graduates go out of their way to avoid acquiring any new academic knowledge after graduation. College (aside from phd programs) fails at teaching people how to learn.
The question actually asks "...worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime".
The value of college to me was mostly social and intellectual, not economic. It's an irreplicable experience. There's certainly some logic to skipping that experience, but I couldn't recommend it.
My degree was 5 years back in the day. Was it worth it? Maybe, probably. But these days people seem to get a bachelor's and a master's in 5 years, and it kind of pisses me off to have that CV disadvantage when my degree could have effectively been that (the last two years were full of electives to choose a narrower specialization, and was much more research-y).
There are many jobs that effectively require masters degrees today, because there are too many applicants and it’s a convenient way to filter them.
Don't forget it's free in some countries. My degree was 100% free. And don't tell me it wasn't. There has been a lot of free stuff in post-Soviet era. In Soviet Union people had more than most of the folks who are pretty much jobless and desperate now at the moment. My family gotten free 3br apartments from government. My mom and dad were high school teachers.
Nothing the government provides is free. It's paid for with taxes that are forcefully collected and would have been spent or invested privately otherwise. I'm not someone who's against taxes but it's a myth and propaganda that the government can just magically provide free stuff. I'm ok with the government providing things but I want them to be honest about what the costs are.
They are being honest, you're just being pedantic. The fact that everyone pays taxes which ultimately pay for e.g. socialized health care/insurance or college-level education doesn't alter the fact that for the person receiving it, said good comes with no invoice, which is a conventional meaning of "free".
The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
If we’re talking about social costs and social benefits then it does matter. Different countries can have wildly different costs for delivering the same education, an education whose value to society (or lack thereof) needs to be taken into account.
Whether an education is paid for by loans or by higher taxes, the cost is ultimately borne by someone. In neither case is it free and in both cases its cost-benefit difference should be scrutinized.
> The fact that paying taxes is required of all members of the community that organizes, collects and distributes resources in this way doesn't change the relationship between the person and the service at the point of service.
That’s irrelevant to the point the grandparent comment was making, which is that these resources don’t just fall out of the sky and that “I got it for free and I liked getting it for free,” isn’t a good basis for policy.
Anybody who imagines that the use of the term "free" in connection these resources/services means that they fall out of the sky should stay as far away from public policy decisions as possible.
I went to school (K-BS(c)) in the UK, and it was entirely normal to talk about that as "free", despite the fact that in dozens of conversations my parents would discuss the way in which their local taxes funded all of it, including my university education. People are not that stupid ...
> "Free" doesn't mean "has no cost paid by anyone" and never has in these discussions.
Calling these programs “free” obfuscates the issue because there are people (even college-educated people) who genuinely believe the government can just make something appear from nothing; they genuinely don’t understand that the resources have to come from somewhere, which means someone else who does not necessarily benefit from the program pays for it now or those benefitting from the program have to pay for it later.
> Apologies if English isn't your first language.
I would encourage you to review the site guidelines. These kinds of quips are discouraged here.
By this definition, nothing is "free"; there is always some cost, whether financial or otherwise. It's an absurd bit of pedantry that does nothing but derail discussion. Free tuition is free at the point of sale to the student, just like the interstate I drive on sometimes is free to use as compared to the toll roads, even though my taxes paid for both. It's not complicated terminology.
The student does not participate in a transaction that involves paying money in exchange for education. Taxes are collected and allocated as seen fit by the state. Students and others pay their taxes, but taxes are not directly transactional.
Apologies if English isn't your first language.
It's not free, but because of its unique market shaping power, the government is often the best & the cheapest way to do things like education or health care, because it has no incentives to spend money on bullshit to raise prices.
That's why there's a harpist in the hall in fancy hospitals in the US and not at Necker in Paris, or why the administration at universities in the US is multiple times the size you'll see in France. Market shaping incentives.
At the same time many families got a single room with shared anemities. Even people in skilled positions. Just because they got assigned to some factory which management didnt have as good connections. Or preferred to pocket more than take care of workers. Or didn’t ended up in some location where central government was putting in extra resources to make it more desirable.
They're absolutely not, but I think 18 is also young to go into the workplace straight from school.
I think the most valuable things I learned from my degree were about myself and how to work well with others, manage my time that kind of thing.
We kind of need 1 year collage degrees.
I graduated high school in 2005. I had been making and running websites and forums (phpbb anyone?) since 1998…ish?
I went to a solid state college, started my degree in EE, bounced around a bit, landed on comp sci, almost failed out, and now (given that story) I’d never have been hired anywhere.
As it turned out, it the value I provided to my first job was… significant? I kept solving problems, usually with zero code and just technical suggestions.
I loved going to college. I loved everything about it. I wish I could do it again. I learned nothing.
No shit, half the people who got college degrees are in debt over it and mostly just lost out on prime years of their life doing busy work for little to zero benefit. Was my class about pre-colombian society interesting? Yes. Has that knowledge helped me in any way related to my job or career or life? No. It certainly wasn't worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take that class to meet some arbitrary requirements. I could of gotten the same knowledge and enjoyment from watching some youtube videos or reading the published book that class was 95% based on.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
Those degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
That's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
You don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
Objectively, universities function as indoctrination centers that lower the reproductive rate of the most intelligent in the population. They take women away from their support networks/family, preoccupy them for four of their most fertile years, and then saddle them with debt that ties them up for another five to ten years. It's horribly dysgenic. At a minimum, pregnancy during college should be encouraged, there should be free daycare, and the college loan racket should be blown into a million tiny pieces.
Ask the women if they want to be dependent purely on their family or man.
IIRC Mark Andreessen once said colleges esp ivy league ones, simplify the job of recruiters by acting as filters. Saves them the bother. So they attached lots of value.
I guess that's true even now but in a perverse sort of way. As markers of indoctrination and unsuitability for productive corporate roles.
Employers probably decided to avoid them.
That's not fair to a large number of students but the old system of colleges being markers of intelligence, suitability etc was not fair to large number of others either..
Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges?
I agree that colleges have acted as filters, but the value of degrees has been deflated, even in Ivy leagues, because they’re easier and more common. I think a degree still acts as a filter though; getting a job is hard with a degree but nearly impossible without.
EDIT: There’s the Thiel fellowship, which requires not having a degree, but I’m not aware of other such opportunities. Early work experience looks better to some employers than university, but that requires getting a job in the first place.
> Do you know any employers actively avoiding students from Ivy-league colleges?
Yes.
The Ivy grads are often considered over-qualified (rightly or wrongly). Especially for government positions that don’t normally hire elite school grads and smallish local/regional businesses.
I know plenty of people who work in different government positions (federal, state, local) who will not hire grads from an elite schools (Ivy, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) because they think something must be wrong with them (“why would they apply for this job?”), or they think that the applicant will jump ship at the first opportunity.
I agree that those can both be issues, but I’m not sure those issues are limited to or are more likely in elite school grads.
I’ve certainly seen situations in which elite school grads have worked at an org that didn’t normally hire any of them, and the quality and quantity of work produced caused there to be some tough conversations in terms of standards and evaluations (they basically “crushed the curve”). In the two cases I’m most familiar with, the people in question were relatively non-ambitious female employees who just cranked out high quality work. They took those jobs because they were decent jobs near their respective families. In both cases, the companies had bittersweet feelings when said employees left —- they lost productivity, but they no longer had the manage outlier performers.
One of these ladies left her job to become a stay at home mom. The other joined a more prestigious privately-held company who seemed to know how to harness her abilities (she moved up quickly).
So… it happens.
I was a hiring manager at a company that didn’t recruit from top universities for strategic reasons. In short we were smaller and a startup so it would have been difficult to compete. As we grew we had a presence at university job fairs but still avoided the top schools.
Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.
The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.
I don't know about actively avoiding, but I have worked for multiple companies in London who prefer not to hire at the 'top' end of candidates (hence hiring me!), because they'll cost more and can have cultural issues like not be very fun people or thinking themselves to be above the self-taught and weird-career guys who didn't get a first from Imperial.
There's lot of anecdotal chatter and also mainstream media coverage on this.. It's a genuine concern.
But bigger issue is in USA where general jobless numbers are lower, with several sectors facing shortages, why is there the issue of grad unemployment at all.
The correct answer is important because politicians are filling the vacuum with false narratives to suit their base.
The downward "is it worth it" trend over the last 12 years is partly due to the continued upward climb of college tuition. Some schools are now at $100,000/yr for tuition, room, and board. In order for this to be "worth the cost" they would have to have a strongly positive expected value in terms of future earnings.
And a positive EV isn't sufficient. It would also need to have a very low chance of negative EV. Otherwise people would be crazy to sink $400,000 into a degree that might or might not leave their child with better job prospects in the future.
Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.