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by karaterobot
1463 days ago
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An undergraduate degree has value, but the costs should be considered, and it should all be weighed against the alternatives. For different people, the outcome of such an evaluation will be different. The unfortunate thing is that many people (like me) just assumed that college was the one and only option, and didn't think twice about it. When you're in high school, everybody tells you to go to college. Teachers, guidance counselors, most adults. So, you just plan to go to college. Nobody is telling you "consider learning a trade," or "consider traveling", or "consider that you can write books/program computers/start businesses without a degree". Sophomores and Juniors in High School are often not worldly or mature enough to ask these questions themselves, and nobody is revealing to them the complexity of the first big, life-changing decision they'll have to make. Or, at least they weren't in my town in the 90s, maybe it's different now. |
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The trades are often romanticized, but overrated in their ability to reliably provide a middle-class standard of living. There will always be some trade that is in high demand and can therefore offer a middle-class salary... but within ten years, it will be flooded by new people, and that will end. (This is the case unless there is a strong union in place and it stays strong.) That's just how the labor market works. The selling point of an advanced education is that it provides insurance against labor market fluctuations, since you're hired for something other than your commodity labor (in theory). That's no longer the case these days, but that's a problem with our society, not our schools.
As engines of social mobility in the US, colleges aren't great--they're expensive, often very elitist, bloated due to runaway administrative costs, and usually staffed by researchers who consider undergraduate teaching to be their fifth priority if at all--but they're still better than literally anything else our society has in place. Our laws are written by millionaire Boomer scumbags, our businesses exist to ratify an existing hereditary elite as meritocrats while being hostile to actual meritocracy, and our culture is thinly-veiled capitalist propaganda. Our colleges might get a C-minus, but that's still ahead of the F that everything else in this country gets.