[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.