[freehunter]

When I was 15/16 years old I was promised by adults I trusted (teachers, principal, parents, family members, speakers at my school) that if I got a college degree I would be guaranteed a good paying job when I got done. At 15/16/17 years old, you are a child and you follow the advice and leadership of adults. In my senior year of high school, my parents started taking out loans in my name (called a Parent Plus loan) to pay for my college. Could I have refused? Yes, but remember I had been promised by every adult that I needed this to get a job. "A bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma" I remember being told over and over [1] [2]. If you don't want to work at McDonalds, you have to get a degree.

So yeah, no one put a gun to my head and forced me to take on student loan debt. Instead they put poverty to my head and threatened that I would sleep in my car and work for minimum wage if I didn't.

When you are a child and the adults tell you this is what you need to do for your future, you listen. What you're doing is blaming children for the bad advice their parents and mentors gave them.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-th...

[2] http://www.msnbc.com/jansing-co/college-degrees-are-becoming...

[rjf72]

On top of society strongly directing people to university, we also intentionally mislead people about their future potential. 'You can do whatever you put your mind to.' Ostensibly it's good for young people to believe this, but it is of course not true. Loan companies are able to exploit this false belief for the sake of profit. 47% of people age 18-29 think it is very/somewhat likely that they will become "rich." [1] If you restrict that just to those that attend university, the number is probably even higher. So what does going 6 figures in debt matter if you'll be a millionaire a decade after college?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/154619/Americans-Having-Rich-Cl...

[bargl]

Your parents didn't give you bad advice at the time (that is without the hindsight of current knowledge). At that time it was GREAT advice. The problem with advice is it only works in hindsight.

I'd suggest anyone going into college right now get a CS degree, but in 20 years that may be automated away.

Who knows. People gave you advice in good faith, they weren't trying to steer you wrong. It's what they were told was the best thing for their kids. Blaming parents or kids or even mentors is the wrong thing. It's how everything entwined that created the situation. No one tried to create it and society couldn't see it coming.

[rjf72]

I'd like to agree with you, but how could "society" not see what would happen if you increase the percent of college graduates from e.g. 5% to 35% in a matter of just several decades? And this started to happened about the same time that we nearly doubled the labor force by first "allowing" and gradually starting to effectively require that women also work.

Skills are valued for their rarity. Get rid of the rarity, get rid of the skill's value. The most realistic concern for the value of a CS degree is not automation, it's other humans. Add far more people pursuing CS degrees, without a proportional growth in the job market, and you'd see wages and demand for it plummet.

And there also factors like China in the future. Outsourcing only really stuttered because the quality of the outsourced products was consistently poor. But there's no inherent reason this must always be the case. If China can start being a source that companies can turn to for high quality software solutions at a low cost, run of the mill software development could go the way of industrial manufacturing.

[bargl]

I think the best way to see how society could not see what would happen is to watch any TV show that has ever tried to predict the future ever.

Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.

Twitter? Ha.

Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.

Global warming? Didn't see that coming...

Flying cars? Nope not yet.

Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.

Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.

Until they weren't.

EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.

[rjf72]

I don't really think any of those were comparable. The situation with the devaluing of an education is an extremely simple case of supply + demand. When usable skills are rare, they have a high value - when they're not, they don't. Again the same thing that makes it easy to predict what the longterm outcome of 'get [everybody] in computer science' will be. It'd devalue the skill to the point that it'd be worthless, much the same way that when you 'get [everybody] a college degree' those degrees, in and of themselves, become worthless.

Put another way, I can't imagine how anybody could predict anything else besides exactly what has happened.

[fjsolwmv]

What college did you go to? Public or private? In state or out? Community or state? What was your major field of study in college?

Why would you be homeless if your parents have a home with a room for you?

How old are you? The student debt crisis is 20 years old already.

If it's your parents' fault, take their money to pay back the loan. What's your parents' excuse for taking out large bad loans?

[xibalba]

Who to blame then? Your parents and other adult advisers? Your college? The government?

I do agree that parents/teachers/principals etc bear some responsibility, but surely so too does the individual student, no?

[freehunter]

>so too does the individual student, no?

You mean the child? Following the advice of their parents and mentors?

[xibalba]

Yes, the 18-22 year old "child". Otherwise known as an adult.

[freehunter]

People are usually 15/16/17 when they start applying to universities and applying for loans. You know, children.

[xibalba]

Applying for college, yes. Applying for loans at 15? No. In the U.S., loans are generally applied for on an annual basis and disbursed on a semester basis. So once again, we return to these people being 18-22 (adults).

My actual point was that yes, parents/teachers/principals/other adult advisers do bear some responsibility, but let's also not pretend the actual students are unable to reason about future income and debt.