In a sense this perhaps 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? Yes, 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.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th... was prophetic of this phenomenon years ago.
People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way.
People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
And now both those two systems are failing to deliver those benefits because those benefits which were initially afterthought add-ons have outgrown the institutions that were their hosts. It's akin to a parasitic vine that is now much larger than the tree it grew on and is crushing it under its weight. Both will die as a result.
But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.
Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.
Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.
These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.
Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.
That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
Hell I applaud even boot camps for trying to fill it, for all their faults. At least they tried something slightly different.
You mean when so much of the rest of the world was poorly educated either not very industrialized yet or had their industrial base destroyed by the war? Easy for the US to be "on top" then.
But I much prefer the better educated America that came after that, even if wasn't as "at the top of the world" - though I'm really not sure who else you could be referring to that could be more on top.
The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.
But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.
The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.
Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
But not too abstract. From my point of view, the weird parts of the American educational system are the high school and the college. Everyone is supposed to choose the academic track. I'm more used to systems with separate academic and vocational tracks in both secondary and tertiary education.
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.
Healthcare costs, and hence health insurance premiums, are the same with or without an employer intermediary. The only difference is with an employer intermediary, the insured gets to pay their premium with pre-tax income. The cost of the health insurance is still felt by the employer (shown in box 12 of code DD of everyone’s W-2), and seen by the employee in the form of smaller raises, or higher premiums/deductibles/oop max, or worse networks.
>People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. Job training really has little to no relationship to liberal arts.
Job training didn’t get shoehorned, a cheap filtering mechanism for people worth betting on to be a good hire got shoehorned. But that filter simultaneously got worse and more expensive over time, making it a bad purchase for most students and bad signal for employers.
If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
In practice, this operates as blame as a service.
Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
> If you read the fine print of a health "insurance" plan at a large company, you might discover healthcare costs are directly covered by the employer and the insurance company just administers the plan according to "set rules".
Generally this is done by a TPA (third party administrator). In many ways you can do as you wish, but as insurers have already done the actuarial work, it's generally easier to use a plan and tweak it if desired (like "Give us this plan but pay for 1 massage/week") versus having to figure that out yourself.
So the healthcare isn’t cheap, but the employer is able to gain more control over their employees by tying a piece of their non employee life to the employer creating more friction to prevent people from shopping for jobs with higher pay, and the employee is getting a small tax benefit.
My mom's plan randomly denied my medications all the time as a student. My current job's plan always provides coverage.
Both were the same insurance company, but she's in a different field with a more stingy employer.
That's missing the biggest problem, which is that the employer gets a free chance to extort the employee in all sorts of illegal ways lest they be cut off and die.
Wage theft is perhaps the biggest-value type of crime every year (sources disagree, but it's certainly higher than many), and that's only one kind of illegal thing employers do when they have all the leverage.
While it may not be optimal, there is plenty of training/learning that happens in colleges.
When one then compares US facilities to foreign ones, it's trivially easy to see that many parts of the system just look different, which comes from the perverse incentives of going through employers that aren't big enough to actually push down on providers' prices at all. Both truly private, low insurance systems and universal healthcare systems end up having much better incentives, and therefore lower prices, regardless of who is paying for them.
We get something similar when you compare US universities to those in Continental Europe. It's clear that over there, the finishing school component is so vestigial as to be practically invisible, whole the focus is a filtering mechanism that attempts to teach something. Go look at, say, Spain's universities and see how many open electives are there, or how many university-wide general requirements exist (0). Each degree is basically an independent unit, and chances are you'll never visit a building from a different school. Undeclared majors? Nope. Significant number of students living on campus? Nope. Sports teams, offering scholarships? Nothing of the sort. This also leads to much lower prices to the school itself, regardless of whether it's all paid by taxes or students.
See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/ for the case.
The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education. Never mind that there is a big body of research showing that ability tests are a more effective way to hire good employees than interviews. If the ratio of blacks to whites hired is different than the ratio that apply, you are presumed to be racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
So a company that needs to hire literate people can no longer, as used to be standard, allow high school students to apply and give them a literacy test. But they can require college.
Therefore college has become a job requirement for a plethora of jobs whose actual requirement is "literate". Jobs that people used to be able to do out of high school, and jobs that could still be done by plenty of high school graduates. That this has become so ubiquitous lead to an increased demand for college. Which is one of the factors driving tuition up.
(My suspicion is that an ability test would lead to a less racist outcome than requiring college. Why? Because minority families struggle more to afford college.)
But as a matter of empirical reality, our enforcement system declines to prosecute employers who require degrees, because requiring degrees is morally good and requiring exams is morally bad.
The rules about what's allowed don't actually derive from the law. We have laws that forbid everything, accompanied by selective prosecution of only the things that certain people disapprove of.
Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.
The cause is laid out in your second sentence.
Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.
However I can’t find evidence of that now that I’m looking so if someone could confirm one way or the other that this was true or not, I’d appreciate it
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.
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.
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.
Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story
You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.
The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.
This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.
Yes, more than one.
Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.
Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.
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.
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).
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.
It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.
Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?
I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money
Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
This isn’t socially useful.
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.
For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
- 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.
• 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.
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 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.
Told by who?
Their parents.
What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years.
It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation.
I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood?
Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
California's schools (for instance) aren't funded by local taxes, they're funded by the state and allocated funding based on a formula[1] of performance, need, population, etc. They can be augmented by local taxes, but in practice that's rare as the wealthy just avoid the system altogether; instead, opting for private institutions.
That's at least 12% of the population that is not funded in the manner you outline.
For one unremarkable observation in this area, see the following think tank report:
> States often commission cost studies to establish the level of funding required to help students meet state standards. LPI analyzed five of the more recent of these studies [...] All of these studies recommended additional weighted funding to support English learners and students considered "at-risk," which was most often defined by a measure of family income and also included other factors [...] The recommended weights for English learners in these studies ranged from 15% to 40% of the base grant level in each state. The recommended weights for at-risk students ranged from 30% to 81%. Compared to the recommended funding in these states, the LCFF’s supplemental grant weight of 20% is at the lower end of the recommended range of weights for English learners and below the range of weights for at-risk students.
Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
I doubt most people would even believe the differences until they saw them, I wouldn't of believed public school could vary that much until I personally saw it. Going from some middling school with a half dozen rich properties around, versus a truly poor rural school, showed me how true it is. The better middle school was teaching topics that the poor rural school didn't even broach until senior year. Our civics book from the late 2000s talked about the civil rights movement as an ongoing and building issue too keep an eye on, and half the school books had kid's grandparents name signed in them. Our calculus class, which was downgraded to pre-calc after a few years because so many kids failed college calc entrance exams, had a teacher bragging about how it only took her 3 tries to pass calc 102 in order to qualify for that teaching position. You certainly didn't get very many good teachers when they pay was that far below the national median wage, and it was sad to watch them struggle to afford things as simple as whiteboard markers, or copy paper in order to print student assignments on, because yes the school couldn't afford and didn't supply copy paper for teachers to print assignments on other than a literal single ream of paper to last the entire year.
Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.
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
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."
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.
A happy side effect of that university degree was a more rounded education, which now many young adults will be missing out on. The downstream effects could be catastrophic.
Absolutely! So many people bemoan taking general Ed classes, but knowing the basics about economics, literature, science, art, math, history is valuable if you want to think critically about the world.
Sure if that is relevant to what your goals in life are. I chose to get an education that was tightly coupled with the outcome I wanted.
Also, knowing a little about a lot of things doesn’t preclude you from being an expert in your field.
The issue isn't teaching, it's learning. I don't think it's at all obvious that being taught by college professors is the best way to learn that material.
That's not the online material I was referring to. Many universities have their course materials available for free online. Not to mention other online learning sites.
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.
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.
Do you have numbers? If you don’t, the appropriate baseline is population.
I’m a manager in a unique field where people come in with many educational levels. There is little correlation between educational credentials and job performance. A variety of previous jobs and having lived a few different places seems to correlate more with performance.
Also: Any positive or negative effect of a college degree is either amplified or moderated by candidates self-selecting. A candidate who greatly values their college degree will seek out employers who do the same, and vice-versa.
I took just one such course—gender studies—which was utterly abysmal. There was zero tolerance for debating ideas or considering opposing viewpoints. You either assimilated with the group think, or you were castigated for your heresy. It was indoctrination, not education.
If it was "Women should be allowed to vote" I can understand the teachers reluctance to engage in debate.
Edit to add: Also, you failed to learn the lesson that you can't always quit in the face of tyranny. Did you never have a history or civics class in high school?
Which university, which year was this, what was your major, and what happened with your education and/or career after you dropped out?
And what precisely do you mean by "castigated," in your specific case?