More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships

It also grows the intellectual souls, exposing people to far more depth of thought. It also builds professional networks. If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good.

Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career paths don’t require it and many aren’t smart enough for it (and thus the debt will be crushing).

But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do - learn one of those and you can do just about anything.

I'd also add

4) A social / networking experience. As an adult, rarely will you interact so often with so many people of your age.

5. A signaling mechanism. I have X credentials so give me job Y. This is far from ideal because the signal can be noisy. But it is a data point. It's similar to how physics PhD's are targeted for quant finance roles - they've signaled they can solve hard problems!

I’m just a HS graduate who should’ve failed my senior year, and I may well have dropped out of HS if I could go back and do it again. So, an enormous grain of salt should accompany what I’m about to say.

I think the benefits of a liberal arts education are probably worth everything its proponents say. Having a well rounded education, which exposes one to not just new ideas but an openness to new ways of thinking, is invaluable. I’ve hobbled together what I can from earnest interest (and some free courses from universities which opened up their lectures), and I’ve grown a lot from that. I hesitate to imagine how much more I’d have benefited from college being described not as a vehicle for future success but as a part of becoming a person in a world that only gets more complex—with age, responsibility, and time in a society.

I lucked out on the career front, but a more formal and broad education is something I really regret not pursuing at the time it most fit my life trajectory. And I think everyone benefits from that spirit of education continuing to exist.

Not just three uses, but also three fundamentally different offerings:

1. If you're looking for a professional trade school, go to a state school for undergrad. Every elite graduate who joins a BigCo after finishing finds themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with ten state school graduates who paid a fraction as much as they did to get to the same exact place.

2. If you're looking for an elite finishing school, well, there's only so many schools at the top. Ivies or Stanford or bust. If you don't get in, or can't afford to go, well, this route simply isn't open to you. Just don't fool yourself into thinking some small land grant college few people have heard of will give you the same thing. Elite finishing schools are what they are because of the connections you form there, not the educations they offer.

3. You have a much stronger head-start on the rest of the academic market if you start at one of a handful of schools, places like MIT or CalTech. You can, of course, still end up in academia coming from a state school, but it's much, much harder to stand out, much harder to get involved with undergraduate research, much harder to put together a strong academic portfolio not for any graduate school but for connected graduate schools.

> 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost)

As somebody with a PhD, I say ho hum. I only took on 5 figures of debt, after quitting tech after the "dot com bubble." I had been bored out of my skull with the monotony and lack of intellectual challenge. But 7 figures of opportunity cost? Maybe even more, if I had joined the right startup. But I moved from low tech to high tech, using my degree in industry. Money is nice, sure, and can solve some problems in life. But real value is satisfaction. It doesn't have a price tag. There isn't a number of digits that would make me reconsider my choice.

If your primary measure of success is wealth, then university has never been the answer.

This pessimistic view doesn’t seem that well supported by the data. In the US, we’re pushing nearly 40% of bachelor’s degree attainment, which is far broader a population than you suggest. There’s also the problem that degree holders earn an average of 2x more than non-degree holders. I was very surprised by this! The St. Louis Fed published this statistic in an article arguing that the wealth advantage of college was waning, but it kinda backfired on me when I looked at their absolute numbers. The fact that many many many good jobs require a degree and that earnings are statistically higher for people with degrees, I speculate, is driving college rates far more than all three reasons you proposed, combined… from a students’ perspective.

I'm surprised you didn't include anything about meeting people for work, romance, friendship, or other social benefit, as for many, that can be a huge part of college.

it’s more like people tricked into going into the finishing school route at a non-elite college, not about whether you come from a rich family or not and don’t need to take on debt.

Go to an Ivy League and major in history and you still have a better chance at getting a job at an elite investment bank than someone who goes to a non target state school and majors in statistics or something.

People—and not just "elites"—actually go to college to learn things. This is way too cynical/contrarian of a take.

Attend more actual college, read less Howard Zinn.

I think part of the challenge and problem is that college has come to be synonymous with high tier universities.

There's a ton of non monetary rewards that can be had cheaply from learning, whether it is art, history, or any of the non technical professions. This value can be had for pennies on the dollar at community colleges without locking oneself into a 4-year degree track. You can ignore it GEs and simply take the classes you want to learn. You don't have to front load education into your early twenties and then stop completely once you are done.

4. An amalgamation of sports teams for talented athletes to shop their skills to professional sports scouts.

I don’t know. I studied ancient history and historical linguistics in college. I managed to graduate with <$10k in debt because of working multiple jobs, academic scholarships and Pell Grants. Now, I have worked professionally as a programmer for >23 years, but I don’t consider my time in college to be wasted at all. College introduced me to a much more diverse group of people. I got to interact with very smart people on a continuous basis which helped me to think more clearly, more logically, etc.

Yet in the meantime UCLA got 146K applications this year, and UCSD more than 130K. Students with 4.3+ weighted GPAs and 15+ APs still got rejected. UC's admission officers (AO) in their pubic talks made it clear that academic performance account for only 40% in admission, extracurricular activities another 40%, and personality 20%. So, UC systems give AOs 60% of the discretion! How is it different from the garbage Xiaolian System that Chinese used before the Tang dynasty? But I digressed. The point is the demand for top-tier university is nothing but higher.

> fields that don't truly need the education

Even if that's true, isn't part of the problem that a lot of those office jobs that don't absolutely need the knowledge still expect a bachelor's degree? Even if it was nothing more than "finishing school," you're going to have a hard time finding a job in HR, sales, etc. without college.

I agree completely but wanted to add a fourth point, which is that college is a necessary stepping stone for most professional sports.

I'm an engineer now, but am still very glad I had a liberal arts undergrad.

4. Time spent outside the rat race without leaving a hole in your cv

> this completely cripples them in the future when they could otherwise have had great careers

> It's good that students are turning away now

Conspiracy theory: the powers that be, are not dumb, they know this, and rely in this to increase their stability by eliminating the competition and the ambitious. Scared people make bad decisions; their replacement for neutering-via-college is not likely to be as easy to deal with, so I donno about "good" as an adjective.

> they could otherwise have had great careers in fields that don't truly need the education you get from a college.

What fields? I can't even get an interview for any job that isn't factory/grocery/warehouse because I don't have a degree. That useless piece of paper opens doors.

4. Extending adolescence 4 more years, slowing down the transition to full adulthood.

"The market is correcting itself". It seems Adam Smith's Invisible Hand has left no stone unturned but the paradox is that soon his ideas, along with those of Keynes, Marx, Ricardo, Galbraith and Friedman will only be familiar to the elites who can afford a purely academic education which we, here in the UK, received free for 25 years after 1962. The rest will be chasing their accountancy or AI qualifications, discussing quantitative techniques in the Students Union bar instead of arguing about current affairs and joining campaigns. A sad contrast with the colourful intellectual climate of the 70s in UK universities. I returned to visit my old university recently only to find the campus full of soul-less franchises and real refectories replaced with a single pay-as-you-go food outlet. The post-it-note-plastered walls of the Students Union I knew have gone, replaced with framed commercial advertising. The population has increased four-fold since I was there yet the Philosophy department is threatened with closure. I kinda knew I had it good while I was there but not how good. I watched Thatcher's reforms gradually erode the student grant in the 80s but no-one could have predicted university life would end-up where it is now with students dependent on unscrupulous landlords hiking rents well above what student loans will cover.

There is truth to your jaded view, you can't just pay money to live on easy street. I had peers who just copied other peoples homework or other similarly self defeating behavior. They paid for education and chose not to get any. The paper degree doesn't have any value at all. It is the pain and agony of sipping on the firehouse of knowledge and the quite literal shared trauma of the whole experience that are the indicators of value.

The most important lesson I learned in college is just because something feels right doesn't mean it is. Just about everything has deep complexity and nuance. If I am not studied in a field, I am probably drawing conclusions from a place of ignorance.

Education is about suppressing our animal natures in order to have a better, more direct, more correct understanding of reality. Education is about destruction of delusions through systematic inquiry and critical thinking. Good education doesn't tell you what to think, but how to think, how to question yourself. It explains why things are the way they are. It is one thing to say "we stand on the shoulders of giants." But it is truly an experience to actually see the giants that we stand on.

Once you spend time outside of the US you learn about the value of education. You learn about high trust vs low trust societies. You learn that people with simple views of the world produce poverty and strife. Educated people outside of the US want to immigrate to the US because of our educated population. They want to escape the consequences of their poorly educated neighbors. The mark of an uneducated person is that they think they are experts in fields they are not. Educated peopled don't want to be around that. Educated people don't want to be ruled by that. Educated people want to be around other educated people.

Before you indict college education, I would encourage you to visit several poor countries and ask yourself why they are the way they are. It's obviously not as simple as poor education, but thinking about how education relates to poverty at a societal level and how education influences a society from a systemic perspective might improve your opinion of education.

I took an engineering path, but when I think back on what I value from my education, it's not the technical training.

I was handed opportunities I never would have had otherwise, access to some of the top experts in the world, and freedom proportional to the level of responsibility I took. College was the first time in my life I was ever around peers or people I considered smarter than myself.

I am sad that your experience with education has produced the grim view of education being purely functional, I believe college is truly what you make of it.

I don't think going to college can be easily summed up (and dismissed) with a numbered list of items. Sort of like saying marriage is just to have kids, get a tax benefit, and save on rent.

This is messed up and gendered today but when I went to school in the '90s people would add a 4th use, saying some women were in college to get their MRS (ie. just find somebody to marry). No clue if it's like that today. Also I don't get why a dude couldn't do the same thing.

I do not think that what society needs is equal what the market needs. People with critical knowledge about society, philosophy, people that could question how good is the market deciding everything are not interesting to the market, but it is interesting to the society. Without publicly funded education, however, everything boils down to what the market decides.

I'd definitely explicitly add business to the first entry. Sure you can work in business without a degree, but the experience with the mathematics and ideas that you learn is definitely a huge benefit.

The top three benefits of college have nothing to do with anything you mentioned.

4. A socially acceptable excuse for spending a few years learning and doing interesting things, instead of focusing on something more productive in the short term.

When I was a student, it was a different time and place (20+ years ago in Finland), but this was a major motivation for many people. Some people didn't have the financial means to take advantage of that, some had too many social obligations, and some were simply not interested in learning. But for many, learning was a major reason for attending a university.

And this was not about the elite. In fact, studying a field with a clear professional identity and good prospects for a high-status high-paying job predicted having high-status professional parents and right-wing values. Studying a more academic field was a weaker predictor for left-wing values and middle-class parents. If anything, the elite saw higher education more as an investment, while the middle class was more likely to treat it as an opportunity to do interesting things.

0. A four-year recruitment and placement agency.

If we're going to be cynical, then #4, the most common, which is 'post-secondary perfunctory education' basically 'advanced high school' which society 'expects' people to perform.

Someone pointed out the legitimacy of learning and expanding one's horizons, kind of the 'ideal' which I suggest does happen in most circumstances.

But #4 is the most common. 'It's the thing the upper 1/3 have to do'. So you half blindly pick a thing, and then get through it.

That said, not only do we need more 'apprenticiships' - we need more such professionalization in the white collar world as well, and the processs should be more organized. Like Germany.

I say this with not an ounce of envy, but the Ivy League cartels need to be broken up. There is way too much that we put into that symbol, it's just to momentus, it weighs like a finger on the scale and creates a kind of unhealthy elitism.

> almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost

Not quite so for immigrants who are likely prevalent (or close) in grad schools.

Might be considered part of #2, but "feeder program for professional athletes" would be another goal for some.

You forgot 4. Party sex camp.

Unfortunately, Its almost a certainty that you're wrong about this.

They realize #3 has subsumed both #1 and #2 with the added twist of inescapable debt slavery with no deterministic way to complete those degrees. Education is no longer an investment, its a casino with the house winning 80% of the distribution.

I'm sure you've heard about weed-out classes where people fail not because of lack of knowledge, but from structure.

Apprenticeships are the only alternative to Professional certifications or educational degrees as job qualifiers.

The latter two options both have subsumed their original primary purpose and have exchanged those purposes for an overarching profit motive instead while stripping due process and agency.

If you know the material you should be able to pass no problem which is what people pay for when they go to college, but instead they are basically bait and switched which is a form of fraud, with no legal recourse in this case.

I'm sure some may argue that you can always sue, but look at ITT tech. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardconroy/2022/02/24/report-...).

I know people who have repeatedly failed Mechanics (Physics), while acing multiple heavy math courses above multivariate calculus.

Their biggest complaints were non-deterministic questions being asked on those tests, and structural course elements that induce causality spirals.

Example of the first being material the material taught is different from what was being tested with no adequate preparation, or in the case of inference there being multiple correct answers without enough information provided to deterministically come to a single correct answer, or in the case of heuristics where you build a context (or initial set of conditions) and that context should only lead to one answer but has multiple correct answers (with some uncommunicated assumption). They were all extremely upset because the tests amount to guesses, and some have repeated the same course every semester with different professors (same structural elements) over 3-5 years, even going so far as to take the course at different district colleges (same structural issues) before dropping out entirely due to the additional financial burden with no path forward.

Examples of the latter being, the answer of the second problem is dependent on the correct answer to the first, the answer of the third problem is dependent on the correct answer to the second. An arbitrarily uncommunicated rounding scheme guarantees most fail.

It might seem from the way I've said this that they just gave up, but it wasn't from lack of trying. Some escalated this from the Chairperson, to the Dean, to the Board of Directors over several years. Ultimately, no corrective action was taken, and its not a new story.

This is why people are generally not going to college and opting for other consistent options.

> under the guise of "becoming a lifelong learner" or something,

That's "finishing school for the [wannabe] elite" who find out at the end that they weren't ever in the elite.

4) Finding spouse of similar background

The payoff to the finishing school part is different if you’re not in the US where the cost is now insane.

A university is where you go to be exposed to the most correct way of thinking that we have.

Sure, they offer other services, and the administrations of these institutions have turned them into capitalist hellscapes which warp even the original service, but the ultimate point of a university is an apprenticeship. Just in thinking instead of plumbing.

This is what education should be, and everyone should receive it. I am not convinced of the value of pre-university education, so perhaps we should just do it earlier.

It doesn't scale the way a business typically scales. You can't automate it or fit it under an ever lengthening hierarchy, but it does in fact scale incredibly well.

Everyone who is taught to think better can teach others to think better.

The market is not correcting itself. The market is destroying the premise of a university.

[dead]

At the risk of sounding like a terrible person, I'd like to be honest for a second about why I went to college, which is to avoid this exactly reality that you just laid out.

I enlisted in the military after finding college to be too boring for my taste. 3 months later I found myself doing the hardest manual labor of my life on a riverboat for the Coast Guard. The pay was not great and nobody cared if you didn't feel like working or were exhausted. The system (as is the military) is not merit based and the guys at the top were pretty awful to the ones at the bottom. By contrast, the officers in the coast guard had nice offices, nice crisp uniforms, nice private rooms, nice private dining quarters, ect. And the difference between those two (enlisted and officer) is a college degree.

What I learned is that I did not want to be an enlisted man. It's a lot of very hard work for little pay and even the highest enlisted man is still saluting the lowest officer.

This was enough to galvanize me to go to college and finish as quickly as I could.

Blue collar jobs are not for everyone. They were not for me. I realize the Coast Guard is not a perfect microcosm of the real world, but in a lot of ways it is. Now that I have the white collar job, I still chuckle at "mental health days" and people complaining about being "burnt out". I chuckle because I remember those days on the river, baking in the hot sun after working for 36 hours straight and how much we all would have laughed until we cried if those words had come out of someone's mouth.

Anyone that hasn't done manual labor really has no idea how rough it can be. I worked as an office-furniture-mover in my early 20s (Summers in college), and some days were pretty tough. Granted, that's pretty low on the manual labor skills spectrum, but even for a guy in prime physical shape, it's tiring and has elements of danger.

Now that I'm double that age, the manual labor I've done like rewiring my house, installing all my own HVAC equipment, and all the yard work for a large property is much harder. I stay sore for days, and it's easy to push too hard to get something done and get injured or overwork my body to where my heart rate stays elevated for hours.

There's something to be said for working with your brain. The worst days dealing with idiot product management and never-ending Jira tickets don't compare to unloading a truck in a hot warehouse or kneeling in a crawlspace for hours re-piping a sewer line.

I think the article is basically about the opposite of romanticising blue-collar work. It's laying out how apprenticeships are already producing white-collar workers. In fact I don't think the existence of blue collar work is very apparent to the writer of this article, I don't know where have you seen any praise of blue collar work unless you've assumed it from the title.

However from the article it's clear that those apprenticeships remain tied to an older model of apprenticeship that doesn't seek to replace most of University, and most of University needs getting replaced more than reformed.

With the economic downturn coming, companies are really going to ask themselves who's necessary. Those white collar workers that have plenty of leisure time are going to suddenly be out of work, and will be forced into the blue collar market, only they are going to have to compete with blue collar workers that have been in the market for many more years than they have. Guess who the company's are going to hire...

As for the white collar workers that made the cut, their job isn't going to be as cozy. You're trading in back-breaking work for mental-straining work with severe time constraints.

This comment seems out of place because most of the article was describing apprenticeships for white collar jobs, and listed a bunch of white collar industries removing their college requirements.

As someone who has taught college, off and on, for many years, people should also be wary of romanticizing college.

The question is always "relative to what?"

Anyway, the move towards apprenticeships has arguably been underway for years: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos...

That said, it's not uncommon to be able to find good blue collar jobs with good employers.

A friend of mine worked a really shitty job for a year, to finally find a much more cushy job, but it's graveyard shift. Eventually they'll put him on day shift. But in the mean time he's earning for his family, he doesn't have to do much work, and he's studying for a degree at night.

If you pick the right field, you have the right skills, and are in a hot market, trades can be very lucrative and you can be drowning in contacts. For someone who wants to be their own boss it can be very rewarding.

It shouldn't be unrealistically romanticized, but with University tuitions only reaching ever higher, much faster than inflation what other good solution is there for Young Adults to get a career and secure their financial future? These options being elevated precisely because of out of control student debt and universities which face zero consequences to financially crippling their pupils.

If I was rich I would still make sure my kids worked at least one blue collar job in their teens. There's no substitute for first-hand experience in that world.

While agreeing with all your points, I think blue collar jobs will get their mojo back soon, especially something not a repeat work, as they will be one of the few jobs that will remain after LLM and AI has automated most of the desk jobs (or at least severely reduced the number of people needed to be employed in them).

While this is all true, the article is about white collar apprenticeships.

Exactly. This is why every tradesman I know wants their kids to go to college.

Depends on the job I think. Every person I know who does any type of home contracting work that I know of is drowning in business and raising rates because of it.

- HVAC

- Plumbing

- Electrical

- General Contractor

- Drywall specialists

- Roofers

Its going to be fascinating how the preference for WFH affects the job market. I'd imagine on-location jobs to get paid more as supply dries up and everyone wants to work from home. Teachers/nurses/chefs were underpaid before, little wonder there is a shortage now, I expect they need much higher wages.

Isn't it a false dichotomy to suggest that a degree exclusively leads to white collar jobs and no degree leads to blue collar jobs?

I think we need to be careful about romanticizing chilling on the job and being sent home early because there is no work. None of that sounds remotely sustainable and if that is your experience I recommend improving your situation as soon as possible.

You are romanticizing white collar jobs as much as you claim people do blue collar ones.

If it requires a license or certification then it’s generally a well paying career with options for the ambitious. It’s why you see so many small shops because it’s very accessible to start your own business after gaining years of experience, reputation, and connections.

One of the reason is that blue collar workers ceded their leverage and bargaining power to unions, that not necessarily have their best interest in mind - unions work in their own interest and that depends on how well corporations can tip that interest in their favour using brown envelopes and other ways.

At the same time the power of workers being able to create their own business and sell their services have been eroded over time, to the point that in some countries it is so regulated it is almost impossible for the workers to organise in small businesses providing services.

I worked in a call center for a while. I'd call it light blue collar work. You don't get to listen to podcasts but these days you might get a remote position. Physical risk is mostly limited to RSI I guess.

Also, if the colleges give out a certain amount of grants to students who can't afford the artificially high tuition, they become non-profits and can bank all that cash into their endowments. That's really the why of tuition hikes. Greed. Thanks MIT who took this to the supreme court in 91 and fucked all future generations!

>It means there's pretty much no downside to banks loaning an arbitrarily large amount, because if the student doesn't pay it back, the government will.

Obama administration ended this in 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Family_Education_Loan_...

The problem that remained, of course, is the federal government itself lends students a blank check as long as the check is deposited at an “accredited” university.

> If people really cared about letting disadvantaged students go to college

> If you just took away the guarantee on the loans, and made them dischargable in bankruptcy, colleges would be forced to compete on price again

You'd also see many people couldn't afford college because they wouldn't be approved for the loan without the federal guarantee. I feel like the solution is universal education, we dance around it because it's not politically feasible but it's the solution. Set some rules around who can attend (grades, testing, etc). Setting reimbursement rates will control costs (like Medicare does). Force the universities to collect from the government (like hospitals do). Force 'quality control'/compliance on education standards (also expected of hospitals).

Fully agree. And to continue this, I think one step that would be accepted across the aisle (in lieu of total debt forgiveness) is to either severely cut or get rid of interest rates on school loans.

The compound interest working against students is a major part of the predation in these loans.

But banks need to make money? Have a one-time interest tacked onto the total loan amount that doesn’t change over time.

This incentivize banks to not loan out as much to just about anyone, and thereby forcing schools to spend less on frivolous staffing and social issues/needless expansion.

Then, slowly reduce the federal student loan amounts to some arbitrarily low amount, something enough for someone on the median salary to comfortably pay back if they went to a state school.

Blue collar jobs are in desperate need of apprenticeships. And there’s good money to be made. But it is legit hard, physical work. And work that needs to get more respect, because without it, water doesn’t run, lights don’t turn on, roads crumble, and buildings aren’t built.

Upvoted, but I have a slight difference as to the best way to help the underprivileged: it’s better to just give money without any strings or designated purposes. This preserves the full competition and downward cost pressure since people can always use some or all of the money elsewhere.

If you provide funding (loans or cash) that is earmarked, then it serves as a price floor and upward cost pressure on that thing.

Let’s just give everybody $20k per year between ages 18-22, with no strings.

> Rant: I feel like most people haven't really thought about why colleges are so expensive now. It is because of the federally guaranteed student loans.

I've heard this thousands and thousands of times. I suspect that most people have heard it already too.

> It means there's pretty much no downside to banks loaning an arbitrarily large amount, because if the student doesn't pay it back, the government will.

This is a misunderstanding of the current student loan system, which is mostly direct loans from the federal government rather than private bank loans. That's why student loan forgiveness by the federal government is a current issue.

Am I the only one who want government intervention on college fees?

Yea, pretty much entirely due to the loan system. It’s also sustains worthless departments.

I got my degree at 35 because of this. Not that I actually learned much of anything in the program, I was there purely for the paper.

This is where schools like WGU excel for those of us just seeking credentials for what we already know. The terms are six months, you can do as many courses as you want during that six months. Over half the courses are just a final exam. You take a pre-test on day one of the course. If you score high enough, you can take the final exam the same day and be done with the course. If one were very determined and knew most of the material going in, you could complete a BS in six months for a total cost of under $4000.

When I hired people at a former company, I secretly thought of job candidates like you as undervalued stocks. Just being honest, don't mean any disrespect — I mean undervalued in the sense of not being appreciated by other companies, not in how much we paid people.

I myself have degrees, but not in anything like software development, and I think engineers who don't have degrees but do exhibit all the other characteristics are just as talented, often more driven, practical, and reliable. Self-motivated, rather than something they fell into. Thinking of the five best engineers I've worked with, two of them didn't go to school at all, and two had degrees in things like music or political science. I've had poor experiences with people whose main qualification is an engineering diploma from a name brand school.

Of course there's a middle band in there where it gets more complicated, but generally I think smart, scrappy companies are eager to hire people like yourself, and I like working for that kind of company, personally.

A job opened on my team where I am working at as contractor. My boss told me to apply for the job.

I got an email back right away from HR stating that I didn't meet the requirements of having a degree.

Joke's on them, I already work there.

I hate to say this but you were probably an unfortunate bait for a labor certification of an existing employee on an h1b visa.

That is generally the only reason companies will stick to the bscs requirement. Normally if you have requisite experience the degree - especially bscs is not needed.

I completed my BSCS at a state school in my 30s after already being a freelance/amateur programmer for many years. I can honestly say I did not learn a single new thing about programming. In fact, almost every single bit of the programming I learned was completely wrong by todays standards, and rife with mistakes.

Yeah, that's a bummer. Statistically speaking you're better off finishing it if you want to maximize the number of places that would be willing to hire you. That said, it can also work in your favor not to finish since it might weed out companies you wouldn't want to work for anyway. I'll say anecdotally of the half dozen or so places I've worked and been involved in hiring software developers--a college degree would only be relevant if you had no other experience to speak of. When I look at a resume I'm looking for "stuff this person has done". Even for entry level, I'd rather talk about a hobby project they spent some legitimate time on that whatever a candidate did in college.

Whatever your opinion may be, degrees are often seen as a heuristic for "can complete a long, hefty commitment".

Check out uopeople.edu. you should be able to transfer most of credits and finish it off in your own time. If nothing else, to not have these stupid questions from hr

Larger places tend to have blanket requirements in part to protect themselves from hiring lawsuits, discrimination, etc.

I look at education when I hire but I’m more interested in experience and I never use a degree as a requirement. I am probably more likely to have the recruiter put the candidate into the pipeline if they have a CS degree but don’t have much experience or experience that doesn’t seem 100% relevant. But that’s not super common.

Hate to say it, but this is why I'm incredibly glad I didn't drop out of college even though I had a solid gig ready to go.

I knew I wasn't cut out for being an perpetual founder and that I'd definitely encounter greater challenges not having a degree than the challenges standing between me and my degree at that point in time. ($7k and 1 year of my life with classes I wasn't sure I could stomach).

Wish you the best, but for those considering this always assume you maybe aren't the best - think about what comforts you're giving up. I will say, anyone you talk to on the college / dropout risk/reward problem are highly biased. Dropouts who have achieved success are susceptible to survivorship bias and will vehemently tell you college isn't necessary. PHD's will always espouse college as the only route because they burned their entire 20's in college.

Other social experiences that you pay a lot for include country clubs and Scientology.

I must admit this was very useful for me, too. Not just for making friends, but living semi-on-your-own, having some familiar but mostly new faces, and the excitement of certain activities.

Since you didn’t choose that road, don’t beat yourself up, but make friends in other ways. Do you have meetups nearby? Attend them if so. If not, create them and see who might want to attend. Even advertise at a nearby community college or other means if possible.

There are probably cheaper ways to make friends.

I wish we would try to bring the german apprenticeship program back to its former glory. It's such a shame that we started expecting university degrees for more and more jobs just to appear more compatible with the international job market.

The german apprenticeship program was a fantastic (and unique) feature of the german economy. Not every job needs a bachelors degree. Quite the opposite actually. Many positions that hire fresh university graduates could fill the position much better with well trained people who already have lots of hands on experience. Instead we have tons of people with bachelors degrees that basically need to be trained from scratch because the education they got was waaayy too theoretical.

Unfortunately the apprenticeship program is now far less prestigious than a bachelors degree (which is also heavily reflected in pay). So anyone who can go to university won't choose an apprenticeship.

Such a wasted opportunity.

Software developers also don’t make that much in Germany. You also need to get past the apprenticeship gatekeepers. No thanks.

Same here in Switzerland. Apprenticeships are called “Erstausbildung” (First education) now. It’s regarded as a stepping stone.

I assume you work in software.

How hard does the HVAC guy work? I wager if you compared wages earned per hour worked (not just employed), you come out ahead. You probably beat doctors and lawyers, too.

Large salaries mean nothing if you don’t account for how much effort is expended to earn the money.

I spent 4 years getting a Computer Engineering degree (in the US), and learned nothing that I didn't already know. Also, they didn't even bother to teach us the most important aspect of computer engineering (signal integrity......)

well what would your job prospects have been with a non-STEM degree?

But where are you, where would you like to move to?

I did my Master's degree solely for visa. Nothing else.

What little I learned in Master's, I could have learned from online MIT/GaTech/Michigan/Stanford courses with much more flexibility, and for free. And a lot better quality, too.

All the "network" I built that was of any value to me was made in mailing lists, Twitter, Google Groups, and later Discord.

> People stopped wearing suits at work, even for interviews, because the signaling value of a suit is zero.

In fact it's become an anti-signal in software; people look at you funny. I actually failed an interview once because I wore a suit.

There are some industries where suits are still regularly worn, though even in these fields (law, banking) it is less common than before. In Silicon Valley, lawyers only wear suits when going to court or to depositions.

Yeah, outside of finance, it would seem like it's the opposite, signaling lower status and conformity.

Nowadays that's just not the case. Between credible certifications, blogs, gihub portfolios, open source projects, etc - I can get a TON of signal on you that would be more valuable than your college background.

But this is just a tiny subset of jobs though.

> go to college but only once you know what you're trying to get out of it.

Unfortunately by the time you figure that out, they don’t want seem to want you.

Demographic shift? There could have been (probably was) larger number of 18-24 year olds ten year than today.

Insurance is the only profession I know of where there are many senior leaders in their forties without a degree.

Four-year universities haven't seen much of an enrollment decline, especially not more prestigious ones like the UC system. Here is some data breaking down enrollment numbers 2017-2022 by type of institution and type of degree sought: https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estima...

Percentage changes in undergraduate enrollment over that 5-year period were:

    Seeking a bachelor's (4-yr) degree:    -6%
    Seeking an associate's (2-yr) degree: -21%
    Other undergraduate students:          -8%

If students are more likely to apply to multiple schools than before (I believe that to be the case as competition has increased. I also have multiple cousins currently applying to UCs, anecdotal) than the total number of applications would appear to increase while total unique applicants may be steady or reduced.

With there being a huge shortage in trades and other roles where they'll provide an apprenticeship, versus credential inflation and jobs requiring a bachelor's just for entry level positions, it makes sense to go where you're valued as a worker and be catered to instead of having your originated student loans extracted from you for simply a chance at a white collar job.

https://www.newsweek.com/forget-college-skilled-trades-are-f...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/despite-rising-salaries-th...

Did you have fun though? Because imho, that’s part of the point.

Not to be rude or unsypathetic, but did you think that spending $80K was going to turn you into an artist?

The acceptance ratio is a poor measure, because applying to multiple schools is easy. Likewise, I first remember skyrocketing ratios of applicants to job openings when laser printers became ubiquitous.

In between college versus apprenticeship, students could apply for both and then pick the one that seems like the best deal.

Yeah, the UC's application system is a bit ... disingenuous is the wrong word, but it's a win-win for applicants and colleges: all the applicant has to do is check all the boxes and pay the not-terrible application fees and bam, they've applied to all the schools. This pretty much forces all the students to apply to most, if not all, of the campuses. Which gives every UC campus the maximum possible applicant pool.

Someone in this thread wrote this:

"California Universities just had the most applications in history. UCLA 145k applicants, UCSD 130k applicants. Respectively they are both down now to about a 3% and 5% acceptance rate due to the spike. Might be Covid holdovers due to a gap year, or with the economy as it is, out of state applications have dropped."

If it's true, that's crazy. Up until this year, I think the lowest acceptance rate was Princeton at 3.9%.

I'll guess ether Berkeley or UCLA? That's why you apply to more than one.

Even the Cal States aren't bad schools, you can get a quality education at a fraction of the price.

YIMBYism in California has been and will continue to be about expanding the schools (and not just building new ones in bumbfuck) a lot.

Would you be willing to elaborate on what you've seen a bit? I'm on the last semester of my CS degree now and have definitely seen a lot of similar effects as a result of Zoom courses and general isolation during COVID lockdowns. There's generally less willingness to reach out to people than there used to be, and people seem to prefer dividing up tasks and working independently over collaborative work (e.g. each person in a group project having a "role" rather than working jointly on a large segment). There's also a general preference towards working at home without any external interaction whatsoever and a lack of willingness to form study groups. As I start moving into the job application phase of things, I can definitely see how these traits can be seen as off-putting to hiring managers, and I'd like to avoid falling into similar traps. Is there anything else you've noticed that would be worth avoiding?

I can say the same for those in humanities and the opposite for those in CS, anecdotally. The thing about CS is it has a clearly defined path that kids can prepare for. Expectations and conventions are known ahead of time and can be studied and learned (leetcode, code review, requirements gathering, sprint planning, etc.) A history major has no idea what conventions they will need to be ready for in the work force.

General communication and writing skills aren't unique to the humanities.

If the software eng market gets really really bad I might just become a licensed electrician and manage 4-5 electricians. I could remember enough of the 40% of an EE degree I finished before pivotting to CS.

Another option is getting some BS real estate certs and building some kind of middle-man operation where I facilitate / officiate sales of high end homes to rich people who can't view something before they buy (more common than you'd think).

One of those is not like the other in that it requires extensive college. It also happens to be the one that pays more than the others.

I dont think you're looking at the crux of the problem. The real question is, how many people are hoping they're kids pay 40k/year for a humanities degree?

Of course college isnt devoid of all value and people want the best for their kids. Of course.

I’d point out that all the people whining about being “left behind” and blaming Mexicans for it are the blue collar types who would have mocked college back in the day.

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How is this a stretch? As a percentage of the demographic population, A is decreasing and B is increasing.

The fact that there’s fewer people in the current demographic cohort accounts for much of the “missing” ~2m students.

> Where do smart normal kids go now?

The top public university in their state (i.e. UCB, UW, UT Austin, UMich, GaTech, UWisc-Madison, UNC Chapel)? Or 2nd/3rd tier private schools like NYU and Rice?

> I wish we offered free high quality university educations.

You could sponsor somebody's university or college education, pay a full or part scolarship.

Is it really a massive data point? It seems entirely overblown by people trying to score political points.

Lol - I have a derivative thought in that I should have just joined my local police department (no desire to be a police officer, but six figure pay, retirement in my 40’s with huge pension/healthcare benefits, and a stressful day is someone’s mom giving you a hard time at the pharmacy lunch counter about giving their kid a speeding ticket)

I am not anti intellectual but I am anti college. It is a racket. Costs have exploded while at the same time transmitting information is as cheap as it is have ever been. It is about the signal you give from your degree rather than the education you get.

Ezra Klein lost his credibility long ago. Sad. Vox is a rag.

Anyone here remember Wonkblog? I often miss the heady days of the early 2010's.

Funny how we thought we were living in tragic times back then after the 2008 financial crisis. And sure, we were. But there was so much more in store for us, wasn't there?

Education doesn't prepare you to live — experience does. Instead, you're in a bubble during those years.

We very obviously aren't doing it, but that sort of education should be part of high school, at least for the students that are engaged enough to benefit from it.

The current trend to water down what is available so that everyone can check the 12 year box regardless of effort or interest is a terrible waste.

"Free thinking and well rounded" aren't things that seem to correspond with many current U.S college environments though.

Colleges need to cost less. Much less.

And they need to return to free inquiry with more education, and less administration and propaganda and fake studies low effort departments.

Then what you say will be much more true and we will be in a better place.

For every data point like this, there’s also data like mine - I met incredible people during my university years. Especially the first two years when we all lived on campus, we were basically a family. Even though we’re in different coasts of the continent, we still meet up 5-6 times a year, travel, some of us even married to each other.

Socializing and making new friends in your late teens and 20s is an important part of one’s life. Downplaying common space’s (e.g. college, work and etc.) importance and looking at it from a perspective of ROI, minmaxing every aspect of it is probably not the healthiest look.