[rlanday]

I don’t see how the college bubble continues as-is after this. What we had before was basically a common knowledge problem. Everyone knows college is a ripoff and, aside from a small number of degrees, the students are mostly just getting subsidized by taxpayers to drink and smoke pot for four years while the rest of us work and pay taxes. But, we didn’t all know that everyone knows that. There was also a coordination problem in that even if everyone is skeptical of the value provided by the experience, the pool of college graduates was still some combination of smarter and more conscientious than the pool of non-college graduates, so there was a signaling effect to going to college. But now a lot of smart, conscientious young people have an excuse to bail out of the system at the same time. I think many of those young people will end up doing something with this time that sounds better to employers than “I spent $80k a year living in my parents’ basement watching ungraded online lecture videos that were inferior to ones I could watch for free on YouTube.”

[DangitBobby]

I think you might be surprised what you learn if you ask students who are about to enroll in college if they think it's a rip-off. I bet basically none of them say yes. Some graduates such as myself might even tell you that they value their college education, even though they ended up working in something completely unrelated to their field of study.

[Chyzwar]

These kids that drink and smoke pot are paying in personal debt, the taxpayer is not really subsidizing this (at least based on what I was reading). For most career paths outside a small portion of the technology, college is the only way.

Part of the problem is that the US is not spending enough taxpayer money into education. If the US spends a portion of it military budget 570B$ to enhance education spending 70B$ problem could be massively reduced. To compare Germany military spending 50B€ and education 130B€.

[rlanday]

The US spends plenty of money on education. If the data on this site is accurate, local, state, and federal spending makes up about 6.35% of US GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.

[Chyzwar]

Universities in Germany are mostly free with generous system of funding for poor students.

From attached link most of the spending is on state and local level.

>Federal education spending: The federal government had little involvement in education in the early 20th century. This changed in the 1930s when federal education spending increased from less than 0.05 percent of GDP to over 0.3 percent of GDP. Federal education spending decreased during World War II but then increased to a peak of 1.03 percent of GDP in 1949 as it funded education for veterans in the GI Bill. Federal education spending declined in the 1950s to 0.3 percent of GDP, but began an increase in the mid 1960s reaching a peak of 1.2 percent of GDP in 1979. Thereafter federal education spending declined to about 0.6 to 0.7 percent of GDP in the 1980s and 1990s before increasing modestly to nearly 0.8 percent of GDP in the 2000s.

> In the early 2010s federal education spending declined to 0.7 percent in 2015, and is expected to be 0.5 percent GDP by 2020.