[jqpabc123]

The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades.

It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans.

The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway.

Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.

The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you.

[tivert]

> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held as evidenced by the large number of graduates unable to repay their student loans.

I think you're over-reacting to some anecdotes.

> The solution --- stop steering your kids toward college. AI is working toward eliminating many of these "careers" in the near future anyway.

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.

To put it bluntly: that's dumb advice that also takes contrarianism to an unreasonable extreme.

IMHO, the more reasonable reaction the situation is to steer your kids towards an affordable college and a degree path that has a reasonable career at the other end. So towards a decent but unprestigious state school, away from no-name private liberal arts schools and famous schools (unless you they can score a fantastic scholarship); way from majoring in anthropology, literature, or music; etc.

Edit: Also it doesn't seem super wise, period, to advise your kid to go into some low skill/low capital business, then expect them to magically make a successful small business out of it. If people actually took your advice in large numbers, the competition is going to be cutthroat.

[jqpabc123]

Also it doesn't seem super wise, period, to advise your kid to go into some low skill/low capital business, then expect them to magically make a successful small business out of it.

Any less wise than sending them to some diploma mill and expecting them to make a successful career out of it once they are saddled with debt?

Student loan debt is approaching $2 trillion with over 22 million borrowers. Everybody and his brother has bought a degree which makes one not all that special in the current economy.

Degree or not, success in today's environment is highly dependent on personal initiative. I personally know plumbers and landscapers and roofers and delivery drivers who are *very* successful --- mainly because they multiple their skills by hiring others. I also know plenty of college grads who work low skilled service jobs.

[johnnyanmac]

>Degree or not, success in today's environment is highly dependent on personal initiative.

This is the one thing we agree with. Now, I don't know the true solution here, but I will admit that even if I didn't end up in my degree's career that college was at least a good stepping stone to learning how to learn. I simply approach stuff differently in college compared to high school.

Maybe that speaks to how ill high school prepares students for the real world, but at the same time it isn't exactly wise to go 0-100 in living in a parent's supervision to trying to make a living at 18 year old with nothing to your name but a high school diploma. Not even direction in life, for some people. I feel we need some intermediary here where you can break off into independence without also worrying about next month's rent when the month prior you weren't even allowed to consent to many life factors.

And I say this with a family history where my parents, and their siblings were all more or less kicked out at 18 to join the military. Don't know if THAT is the path I'd recommend to the current youth either.

[tivert]

> Any less wise than sending them to some diploma mill and expecting them to make a successful career out of it once they are saddled with debt?

Come on. Did you even read my comment that you replied to? I said point them "towards a decent but unprestigious state school," that is not "some diploma mill ... [that will leave them] saddled with debt."

> Student loan debt is approaching $2 trillion with over 22 million borrowers. Everybody and his brother has bought a degree which makes one not all that special in the current economy.

What you don't seem to understand that "everybody has it" != no longer needed. It just means that it's table stakes instead of a guarantee of success.

[gspencley]

IMHO the more reasonable reaction is to take an objective look at what you want to do with your life and a hard look at what the requirements are for achieving that.

Some fields require a post-secondary education. You can't get around that. If you want to be an engineer or a doctor, you need to go that route. In that case, I agree with you. Look for more affordable options and figure out how to meet the requirements without bankrupting yourself. Understand what you are getting involved in before you make any commitments.

Barring the above, I do tend to side with the OP that it is time for a cultural shift away from college / university for the sake of college / university. I know of a lot of people who really valued "the experience", and felt like they found themselves and made valuable networking connections etc. and value those things above the diploma itself. None of that is a bad thing, but ask yourself what kind of dollar amount you are willing to pay for that. Don't assume that you will be resigned to living under the poverty line if you don't pursue that.

I am undoubtedly biased because I have enjoyed a 25 year career in software engineering and this is a niche field where we see tons of self-taught engineers who, in many cases, have a higher work ethic and measurable productive output than their college educated peers. I don't pretend for a second that that can transfer to every other field.

But does that mean the idea transfers to zero other fields?

You don't have to disvalue higher education to question whether or not traditional formal institutions are providing the value that they promise, or to seek alternative ways of achieving that higher education.

[tivert]

One thing you and the OP are not accounting for is social status and flexibility.

A lot of people will judge you for not having a college degree, and choosing not to get one will put you in a position of either having to just accept that or work harder to prove yourself (and you may not even be given that chance).

Also choosing to forsake a degree just plain blocks off a lot of paths. Say, in your late 20s, you decide landscaping ain't for you, and you want to become a doctor. If you never bothered to get an undergrad degree because if some impression that the direct value wasn't worth it (e.g. I don't need those "networking connections"), making the switch got a lot harder: you're going to start from square one, at a life stage where that will be more difficult. If you already have a degree, you can get in the position to take the MCATs and by rocking a semester and change worth of basic science classes. Landscaper -> doctor is a pretty extreme example, but the same situation applies to other areas. I know developers who switched careers from other fields. I don't think they'd have been given the chance if they went high school -> landscaping -> coding bootcamp. Even (early in my career), I knew one developer (who was pretty good), but only had a 2 year associates degree, and the fact that he lacked a 4 year degree hobbled him in many ways.

[gspencley]

> One thing you and the OP are not accounting for is social status and flexibility.

I did account for that. I said that I think it is time for a "cultural shift." That social status and flexibility element exists because of cultural attitudes and assumptions as to the value of a degree.

> Also choosing to forsake a degree just plain blocks off a lot of paths.

Not to get too philosophical, but every single decision you ever make in your entire life is going to "block off paths." If I eat pizza tonight, I am working against my weight management goals. If I dedicate my time and my life to learning to code, I am not using that time to learn medicine.

If you decide you want to go down a new path, then of course starting from scratch is going to take longer. But that is true of literally any endeavour. To me it does not make any sense to start putting in the time, money and energy into a venture in order to get yourself a "head start" down a path that you may never choose to walk down. Life is way too short to make that kind of a gamble unless you KNOW that there is an excellent chance you may want to pursue that. If you think that right now, at this stage in life, there is a 10% chance that you might want to pursue a profession that requires a degree at some point in the future, why invest 4 years of your life and an entire house worth of future income? If, however, there is a 60% chance ... then the value prospect looks quite different.

As someone else said, it is a lot to ask of a 17, 18, 19 year-old to make these kinds of major life decisions. But I think that's an argument in favour of a culture shift. If you choose to spend 4 years and a ton of money you don't have pursuing a particular education path, that is time and money that you will never get back. Only the individual can decide if that was time and money well invested.

So, what if you want to switch from landscaper to doctor? Well, what if you invest 10 years and a ridiculous amount of money into becoming a doctor only to realize that you hate it, made a mistake but need to figure out how to pay off $200k in student debt before you can even begin to entertain a career change? That's one hell of a "blocking off paths" scenario as well. Crippling debt and an unused piece of paper to show for it can be devastating in terms of closed doors. Imagine what you could accomplish in your mid 20's if you're debt free and are pursuing your passions regardless of how other people think you should be living your life?

Who knew that major life decisions could be so complicated?

[tayo42]

> at what you want to do with your life

Your asking 16, 17 and 18 year olds without any life experience outside of high school to do that though.

[selykg]

I'm going to second the affordable college option. I had a lot of help in the beginning so I didn't do this, but still wish I had done it. Community college to knock out the general education requirements and experience a wide variety of different subject areas. My local community college, back when I was going to college in the mid-2000s, was easily half the cost of the larger universities nearby. I have no idea how little, or much, this has changed, but I can't imagine it's more cost effective to goto a university.

We need to stop making it seem like the "college experience" is worth gobs of student loan debt.

[baron816]

People’s perceptions of college costs have been skewed by 1) tuition sticker prices, which really don’t reflect what most students pay and, 2) the media reporting on student debt and inflated college costs.

I think #2 is made worse because it tends to be young journalists writing those stories from places like Brooklyn after having graduated from a journalism masters program at NYU or Columbia. Yeah, they’re going to have lots of student debt, high living costs, and low-ish income, and their reporting is going to reflect that.

[tivert]

> I think #2 is made worse because it tends to be young journalists writing those stories from places like Brooklyn after having graduated from a journalism masters program at NYU or Columbia. Yeah, they’re going to have lots of student debt, high living costs, and low-ish income, and their reporting is going to reflect that.

That's a very good point. Our perception is significantly influenced by the biases of the people whose jobs are to give us things to attend to. That can inflate the obsessions of those people way out of proportion to their objective size.

[aehrhawrg]

This position would have more merit if it held equally true across all degrees. Not counting the inevitable graduates in every field that don't pan out, is it actually equally true for every degree though? Usually when I see people unable to pay their student loans it's my friends who went for the humanities or the soft sciences. The people who chose their degree by treating it as an investment they wanted as high a return as possible from generally did well.

[beej71]

There are a lot of degrees that fail to pay enough to cover the loans required to get them, e.g. teacher, speech language pathologist, etc. And that's a bummer because we need people like that. So we apply bandaids like PSLF to make those degrees viable. It's a mess.

[themagician]

I think higher education is still important.

What I have noticed is that "entrepreneur" in the age of social media has become almost synonymous with scams—doubly so among those without a college degree. I can't even avoid it. Every time I open Facebook or Instagram, every 3rd or 5th post is some kind of scam. The vast majority or reels are scams. People aren't aspiring to be landscapers or start real businesses and a lot of people don't even know the difference between a real business and some kind of scam that they saw on TikTok.

Higher education also doesn't have to be expensive. It can be as expensive as you want it to be, even today. You can get a great education from a state school. You can even offload the first two years to community college if you really want to save money.

[jcpst]

That doesn’t work for everyone though.

I work for an employer because I don’t want to spend time running a business. It’s just not worth it for a lot of us. I don’t even ever want to be a manager.

I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want.

[tigeroil]

I feel like this is a massively underappreciated view in general.

I always see people talking about how brilliant it is to run your own business / be your own boss, but I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day.

I say this as a director of a SaaS company...

[jqpabc123]

I think there's immense value in just finishing and going home at the end of the day.

There's more value in finishing and going home by noon --- or not even leaving the house at all if you don't feel like it.

I know people without a college degree who do this and make very good money.

[jqpabc123]

I’d rather just put in my 40 hours as an individual contributor and then have the remainder of my time to do whatever I need/want.

If you think like a corporate slave, that is what you will always be --- looking forward to the next layoff.

One of my neighbors runs a landscape business --- no college dregree. He has 8 crews and a manager. I'll bet he makes more than you and spends less time doing it.

He works about 3 hours a day --- which mostly involves riding around to make sure the work is getting done as he talks to clients on phone.

[jcpst]

Ok. Am I supposed to feel bad now?

It’s fine if you’re neighbor makes more than me. I bet I have other neighbors that make more than me too.

I bet your neighbor didn’t just decide to own a landscaping business and went straight to his 3 hour days with 8 crews.

Guess what- I worked for myself for 7 years. I had some good times.

I like my “corporate slave” job better. I work when I want and where I want. It doesn’t even have to be 40hrs.

I don’t really deal with customers or deadlines, or making sure other people do their job.

I’m not worried about layoffs. And I’m not wishing for one so I can escape. My boss is the shit. The people high up know me by reputation. They don’t want to lose me. They know I could easily be working for a competitor.

So, what else is wrong with me preferring an employer over working for myself?

[the_only_law]

> One of my neighbors runs a landscape business --- no college dregree. He has 8 crews and a manager. I'll bet he makes more than you and spends less time doing it.

I’m really curious how this works, there’s dozens of existing landscaping business near me already established with connections and business relationships who do pretty well. How do you get into such a saturated market?

[jqpabc123]

How do you get into such a saturated market?

The same way you get into a market saturated with college degrees.

My neighbor started doing yard work as a teenager in his neighborhood. I'm sure he was initially cheaper than the competition --- just like kids coming out of college.

He was making money for years while his college bound friends were saddling themselves with debt. With some hard work and personal initiative, he gradually moved up and now he no longer does "yard work" --- he hires others to do the work for him.

[dragonwriter]

> It has finally nullified any socio-economic advantage it once held

No, it hasn’t, as evidenced by the research on pay differentials.

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.

Entrepreneurship requires capital, and also has a high failure rate; a business of those types can also lead to failure, a worse than starting position, and being back to being a worker in those industries.

[throw9away6]

Business isn’t so easy. Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses, health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3. If you just factor in taxes and healthcare that’s probably 50-60% right off the top.

[jqpabc123]

Regulations intended for large corporations are constantly killing small businesses ...

If you actually ran a small business, you would understand that small businesses are exempted from many of these regulations.

For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't apply until your business has more than 15 employees. Insider trick --- start multiple small companies to avoid many of these sort of regulations.

health care costs will cut your take home by 1/3.

If this is true, you really aren't very successful. Also, health care costs are a deductible business expense.

[js8]

> The key element here is to learn the trade but then move up to hiring/managing others who do the actual work --- for a company owned by you.

Sure, that's totally not gonna be another gold rush / pyramid scheme like the student loans were.

[kevinmchugh]

Learning a trade and then management is a very slow gold rush

[Workaccount2]

College definitely has historically paid off, people have just been impatient with the return timeline. The fruits of a degree don't start to really manifest until your 30's, assuming you got a practical degree. They become undeniable by your 50's.

Going forward though, I think the combination of AI and extreme degree dilution (everybody has a degree) are going to absolutely railroad a bunch of gen-z kids down the line.

[toomuchtodo]

It is not the timeline that is the problem, but the volatility. Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met." So you're throwing yourself at a credential that businesses use as an application checkbox and hoping for the best. That's a lot of debt to incur the name of hope.

[dragonwriter]

> Getting a degree is no guarantee you will be able to obtain a job that will allow you to pay off the loan while maintaining a quality of life somewhere near "basic needs met."

With recent changes to the income-based repayment terms on federal loans, and if, like the vast majority of loan-dependent students those are your only loans, its pretty close (and, at worst, if yo can’t the repayment won’t cost anything.)

[nineplay]

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36934135

Yesterday this was posted with a lot of commenters agreeing that management wasn't for them. With that in mind, I think presenting "entrepreneurism" as a lucrative and rewarding career is misleading. Many people wouldn't enjoy it, many people wouldn't be good at it, many people will not be successful at it - particularly long term. Entrepreneurs will not have easy access to 401ks and ( in the US ) health insurance.

> landscaping or construction

It is interesting to me how many promoters of blues collar careers overlook these industries historic hostility to female collogues. Women have been doing better in college lately than men, so maybe the assumption is that men will forgo college in droves for these sort of trade careers leaving all the white collar jobs to women. It's a plausible outcome.

[runako]

This ignores that the reason that people started pushing their kids to college was that the odds are better with a degree than without, and that still broadly holds over a long career. There never have been any guarantees, but the odds in the USA do not favor folks with only a high school education.

For example, people talk about "landscaping or construction" and other trades but don't consider that working as e.g. an economist has a longer expected career longevity than working in construction.

Also remember that the point of college is to broadly educate the individual, not to be a jobs program. That said, there's no reason a college graduate can't start and grow a construction business. A person who makes $200k at a data science job is in some ways better positioned to start a construction business, because they have the ability to accumulate some capital.

[jakelazaroff]

> Instead, orient them toward entrepreneurism. A business as simple as landscaping or construction can be just as financially rewarding as being a corporate desk jockey ... and even more so in some cases.

The key word is "can". About 20% of businesses will fail in a year; about half will fail in five [1]. That means that unless everyone is a serial entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs will still end up needing to work a "traditional" job for most of their careers.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt

[arethuza]

"The cost of higher education has been increasing at 3-4x inflation for decades."

Well, the CS degree I got in the UK in the 1980s cost me literally nothing - no fees and a full grant for living expenses (which I added to by working in the summer breaks).

Given the amount of tax I've paid, that was an excellent investment by the UK taxpayer!