[XorNot]

Ever talked with someone looking to hire? How often have you heard "I just need to hire someone with a degree and <some list of other minor requirements>".

My university degree is not in tech at all, but it sure has managed to open enough doors to make my self-learned skillset profitable.

Pretending that people were making bad decisions with going to college is victim-blaming - there isn't a job market out there which doesn't demand a degree, pretty much any degree if you want to be in the middle class.

Some just-so story of how people should've picked the obvious degree of some sort when they're 18, have no life experience and the entire job market can pivot around in 4 years is so much junk to defend an overpriced education system which can't deliver on it's promises and is protected by a debt-issuance structure no other financial instrument gets. Undischargeable loans! Give money away and just don't bother ever analyzing the risk. Imagine a student loan system where the issuers might lose their hat if they don't know what the job market would be like for their investments.

[tartoran]

There are good cheap unis and community colleges whose quality is not bad and which cost a whole lot less. I’d like to see those utilized more

[cykros]

Agreed -- having a degree is important; having it from a prestigious/expensive university, for most people, is quite often much less so.

Obvious exceptions exist; we don't typically see presidential candidates who came from a community college. But most of the time, the degree is there more to show you could commit to a more self-directed educational experience than high school, and follow through with it while not usually under your parent's roof. Executive functioning, basically. Show some engagement in clubs, sports, or other activities for a bonus.

In many fields, if anything beyond this is expected, they want a graduate degree anyway, and this is where it can pay to splurge on the name, depending on your field.

[frumper]

My friends that stuck it out in community college near us were on the 5 year plan. 5 years until they had enough credits to transfer to a CSU. A lot of the courses were remedial to catch people up and the college track classes filled up instantly with people that had been in the school for years getting priority. If you came out of high school at a college level, you competed with all of the people that had taken 2-3 years of catch up courses and they got the spots.

[D13Fd]

I think if you had the opportunity to go to an inexpensive school or an expensive school and you chose to take loans and go to the expensive one, then you chose the loans.

That said, I think we are all victims of the horrible free-financial-aid policies that have pumped overwhelming amounts of seemingly-but-not-at-all-free money into the system and driven college tuitions to absolutely insane heights.