[999900000999]

Gen z grew up hearing stories about their older cousins or even parents going $100,000 in student loan debt for nothing.

Now all of a sudden the colleges are like, well technically we can get that down to 85,000 of student loan debt for an English degree. Don't you want to come to college and have a lot of fun!

I still think college is a net positive for most people, but you seriously need to evaluate where you're at and decide what you want to spend. Unless you get into a dream school, or something extremely specific for your major almost everyone should go to community college .

The reason why is if you have a bad year at community college and you just don't want to do it, you're only out a few thousand dollars versus 20 or 30.

Second, when you're ready to transfer you should have a good idea of what you actually want to do and then you can pick a college appropriately. Optimistically you'll graduate with half the student loan debt .

You can have just as much fun going to a cheap community college, and then a cheap state school. And outside of a small handful of outliers the net results are going to be the same. If you get in the Harvard, go ahead and go to Harvard. But if you get into Billy's weird expensive private school, that's not worth the money.

Between birth rates dropping and student loan reality, we're going to see an absolute tsunami of small school closures. Which isn't good or bad, it's just a sign of the times.

While I'm ranting, I absolutely resent this notion of college being necessary to obtain an upper middle-class lifestyle. It's just not, and I know this from personal experience despite finishing college years later. You end up putting a lot of people in a really nasty loop, you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college. That also justifies indefinite debt loads, so what you have to go $200,000 in student loan debt. The nice salesperson said you're practically guaranteed a six figure job when you graduate!

You graduated into a bad economy and end up working at Vons. Sucks to be you, by the way Sallie Mae expects your first payment in 60 days. May the odds be in your favor.

[toast0]

> The reason why is if you have a bad year at community college and you just don't want to do it, you're only out a few thousand dollars versus 20 or 30.

Depends on the state. When I was in college, California community college was very affordable, but when I transferred to a Wisconsin school to get a 4-year degree, I learned there that WI community colleges charged the same price per credit hour as UW. Things may have changed since then, but at that time, if you lived in WI, you may as well go to a UW if you can get accepted, cause a community college wouldn't save you money.

[jart]

There's no point in going to university anymore when you can just go straight into big tech. If you're doing anything mathematical, your late teens and early twenties are going to be some of your most productive years. Why should universities benefit from those years when they don't do frontier research anymore and have degenerated into quasi religious institutions that hand out credentials to anyone with a pulse in order to get rich shackling you with debt? Big tech will literally give you money to be educated.

[ndiddy]

> There's no point in going to university anymore when you can just go straight into big tech.

Assuming wanting to work at big tech is a goal, I'm not aware of any of the big tech companies recruiting for entry level roles outside of colleges. The "boot camp"/"hire anyone with a pulse" period was a ZIRP era anomaly.

[999900000999]

In the free money era the only boot camp grads who I know got jobs already had 4 year degrees.

If you got lucky you got a junior dev or QA position at a small dev shop. Unless you were some kind of known prodigy no one got a FAANG job out of highschool with no degree or experience.

[mixmastamyk]

No one (statistically) is getting hired for a coveted job today without a degree. The first thing they check; without and you go straight to /dev/null.

[paulpauper]

High school, in the past, prepared people for college, so those who were not cut out already had a clear indication during high school. But due to dumbing-down and grade inflation, they now learn the hard way during college.

you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college.

not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.

[zamadatix]

College graduation vs dropout rates have been trending in the opposite direction than this take would suggest though. It could be because to be secondary education being better than you say or because colleges experienced the same kinds of changes. Either way though, the numbers suggest fewer people are finding out they aren't actually cut out for college after graduating high school.

[bluGill]

High school is often sending the best kidsto college with half their first year done already with AP classes.

[Spivak]

Colleges don't really take AP courses in the way you're describing. I took every single AP and dual credit course in HS I was offered and a few more I wasn't. Did you know schools can just order the test for you without the class? Anyway, I went to uni with 80ish credit hours which "coincidentally" didn't count for any of my major classes or electives.

So the AP as a means of saving $$$ loophole has been hard closed.

[thfuran]

I think you're extrapolating a lot from a single datapoint.

[Spivak]

I guess but I went to a major well-known university that isn't weird or exceptional in their process and has the same table of AP to course number mapping for every student so we were all in the same boat.

And in hindsight of course that's how it works, both because the university isn't keen on cost savings but also because every student is coming loaded with APs. AP physics isn't "college physics" anymore it's just high school physics and the optional prereq to Physics 101.

[vidanay]

Between AP and dual credit, my kid should graduate HS with somewhere around 30 hours of college credit.

[GauntletWizard]

I made it to College half a semester off from being a Junior. You can get a ton of college credit before college; and then I quit before I flunked out because I never learned study skills.

[lotsofpulp]

Bachelors level education by age 20 is a reasonable goal by age 2, and masters by 22.

[999900000999]

You can straight up attend community college while in high school. That's what I did, tons of fun. Then I failed a couple of online classes because I wasn't really taking them seriously.

Then I took in person classes at 18/19, fixed my GPA and generally did well. The only classes I really struggled with was Japanese and later French.

With Japanese I pissed my Korean girlfriend off, and had to drop it. French I took for a pass/no pass and absolutely failed.

You absolutely can get a BA by 20, but I'd be more interested in WHY you'd want to speed run academia. Sounds really stressful...

[lotsofpulp]

> You absolutely can get a BA by 20, but I'd be more interested in WHY you'd want to speed run academia. Sounds really stressful...

Even if you have all the money in the world, US high school standards are very low. With some affinity for reading and access to the internet, one can be learning at a far quicker rate, even without sacrificing social life outside of school.

Many kids in the US already do this via Advanced Placement testing, but some states also allow high school students to take college courses.

[fn-mote]

> WHY you'd want to speed run academia

1. You want or need to be making money instead of spending it.

Eg, no family wealth involved; you’re paying for everything yourself

2. You don’t enjoy the high pressure (ish), test-driven environment and want to be doing more meaningful work.

Etc. The number of people who don’t want to spend money and time in college might surprise you. I even know some very academically successful ones with this attitude.

[anonym29]

A lot of those scholarships are locked along racial and gender lines. Immutable traits that, as a society, we have decided, as a foundational principle, are an unfair, unjust, unkind, and uncivil basis to discriminate upon. Equal representation is great. What's not great is producing a system that's so financially unsustainable for working class people that they're told to go solve what is framed as a merit-based challenge in exchange for money, but the qualification criteria for some crazy high percentage (something like 2/3rds, if my memory serves correct) of the challenges exclude certain cohorts of people based on demographic traits they have no control over, including race and gender. It's just a very unbecoming look for a progressive institution, it feels like we're deliberately trying to relive the racial and gender conflict of the last century by continuing to deliberately view all human interaction through the lense of race and gender, and framing race and gender filters as "merit" filters, almost as if to suggest that you can be a fundamentally flawed person by having the wrong chromosomes or ethnicity, rather than by viewing human interaction through the lense of interacting with actual individual people, who all have incredibly rich, deep, unique lived experiences that are not defined exclusively by demographic traits.

I believe it's this point of view that leads to the common perception of higher education among the actual working class - that the American college experience was once something great, but got so watered down in pursuit of ideals other than education that it has essentially turned into a big summer camp for the adolscent offspring of the rich to extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer, hopefully increasing their social credit score in the process, with actual learning being a "nice to have" along the way.

[tbrownaw]

> framing race and gender filters as "merit" filters

Do you have examples? I haven't gone systematically digging into this, but the general impression I've gotten is that this sort of explicit demographic filters are largely associated with the "equity" crowd rather than the "merit" crowd.

[throwaway48476]

I suspect such reframing is very recent.

[bloomingkales]

extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer

Extending the party of youth is roughly one of the benefits of social welfare. When we took the children out of the factories in the 1920s, we extended their youth. When we sent them to college, we extended their youth. When we economically constrained them with high real estate prices, we extended their youth.

Extending youthhood is fine, so long as we do it appropriately. For example, if we did it right, someone entering retirement enters a new youthhood of carefreeness. If we do it wrong, someone enters youthhood in theirs 20s as a dependent of their parents. There's a lot of wrong versions of the last thing I said, where people are kept children in academia to be parented indefinitely by tenor.

It's delicate. We want to provide as much youthhood as possible in a good way, if we can.

As to your first point, you can only be speaking of white men. To this I'll say, white men that come from the same economic situation should have access to the same scholarships. That's a easy one to fix. If you are working class then you are working class, this life is hard enough already.

[bavell]

No, we need more mature and responsible adults in the world, not adult-sized children.

[999900000999]

>not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.

What was all this student loan forgiveness talk about then? Scholarships apparently haven't been cutting it, otherwise there wouldn't be a trillion plus of outstanding student loan debt.

[johnnyanmac]

I had plenty of scholarships and even the GI bill covering me. But I still ended up with 40k in debt at a state school (note that I took 5 years in college).

Luckily, software jobs in the beginning of my career was a strong market, so I aggressively paid them off early into the pandemic. About 3-4 years post grad. But I know that's not the normal story.

[paulpauper]

My point still stands though. The idea is people get jobs and pay the loans back.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, how's those working class wages going?

[HPsquared]

Also a person with a degree in a subject (years of sunk cost) often feels pigeonholed into that field which may not be enjoyable, well-paid or require you to move to hunt for a job in the field. All negative outcomes.

[wakawaka28]

Those are negative outcomes, but they aren't the worst tradeoffs if you study something worthwhile.