Higher Education in the USA - Ripoff or Merely a Lost Cause?
Our middle son (29) and daughter (26) are visiting from Seattle this weekend, and last night we ended up in the almost inevitable discussion of how they are going to "manage" their ongoing student loan debt.
Not an unusual conversation, I realize, in a society where the estimated student loan debt is about $1.3 trillion. That's $1,300,000,000,000. Lot of zeros, huh?
Welcome to a Life of Eternally Running Behind?
White desert flower
Obviously, the kids have been out of school for a while... and both have had pretty stable jobs... for a while. And yet, their lives seem to be seriously buckling under the debt load.
Not surprising, I suppose-- the average 2016 graduate left college with $37,172 of debt.
Of course, the numbers nobody (in power) wants you to see is the fact that the cost of education keeps rising at 6-7% a year in a world where inflation is only 1-2% and college educations-- having more or less become "the norm"-- really no longer give you that much of an advantage.
But the part that makes it hardest for today's students and fresh graduates is the fact (and this is just pure statistics) average incomes have increased about 500% since 1970, while the cost of a public university degree increased 950% over the same time.
The Great Deception
When people complain about "not having enough money" and "not affording life," Conservatives are fond of saying "well, get a better job!" and if that's a problem "get some better education!"
Winter flowers
That's a pretty sound argument... except for the fact that the "old metrics" no longer apply. A college education becomes less and less of a guarantee of anything because pretty much everyone has one, and now the cost-benefit ratio is not what it once was.
It's a bit like saying you should "dress up" to impress someone, but when everyone dresses up... then we're all back to being on the same relative footing, only dressed better.
Meanwhile, Liberals insist we should all have FREE college educations to increase opportunities. But whether you pay for it or not, we're straight back to the "everyone has one" situation... so we're really not any better off, relatively speaking.
The underlying idea is noble enough-- based on the proposition that a free higher education is ultimately a societal level investment in more educated workers. The problem is that many employers would just as well not have employees capable of "autonomous thinking." Better to have easily trainable human "robots."
But... speaking of robots...
The Decline of Jobs as we Know Them?
Aside from the widening gap between cost of education (and the burden of educational loans) and the incomes resulting from them, what also makes the whole thing feel like a ripoff is that kids are being sold the fairy tale that there will be "a well paying job" at the end of their personal rainbows. Put up with the bullshit, pay your dues and eventually... things will be OK.
Blooming hawthorn, Denmark
But we live in an age of increasing automation where jobs are vanishing every year. Human jobs.
When I use the term "vanishing," I mean humans are gradually being replaced by automation. Maybe not right now, but in another 25 years-- when those 2017 grads are in their late 40s-- we simply will need fewer humans to do work, and that college degree you spent so much money on and just finished paying off won't be good for much of anything... at least not on the job front.
Jobs like lab technician, machinist, air traffic controller, truck driver, retail clerk, accountant and a myriad others will not even exist by 2040, or they will exist only as a shadow of their former selves. And no amount of education will bring them back.
Of course, the "easy out" for many pundits is to point at the "new fields" that will open up as technology advances. The realistic truth, sadly, is that most "work" on the horizon involves variations of "automation supervising automation," like (for example) a robot (replacing a human) giving instructions to a sophisticated 3D printer (that replaced a skilled machinist).
Meanwhile, kids continue to go to college, incurring loads of debt that will take them a decade (or more) to pay back, in order to get educations that very likely won't do them a bit of good.
What do YOU think? Are the expensive educations in the US a bit of a rip off? Do young people get burdened by a debt before they even get started? Do you feel this is simply "the way things are," or should a new approach be explored? How many jobs do you think will be replaced by automation... simply making the "needed workforce" much smaller than the number of available workers? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 171209 12:38 PDT
Back in the old days I went to university so I could sink piss, ride my motorbikes, and go to concerts.
I got a degree but it was a total waste of time - I never used it.
But the holiday jobs covered my costs no problem, and that was where I learned useful stuff.
Anyone who pays big money for a degree is getting shafted.
Some still do that expect they don’t even earn a degree anymore and try and get government to pay for it while also gaining other finical help for food and housing.
Was stuck in a couple of classes a few years ago with people who showed up only holding a cellphone. They spent the entire class time hitting on other people trying find a date for the night. While saying over and over their left over grant money has not come in yet and they really need another new pair of shoes or whatever it was.
They would flunk out of the semester. They then gloat about all they had to do was file some paperwork and come up with some excuses as why they failed to be given a second chance at grant money to do another semester. Thankfully after that they get cut off and move onto the next thing they find to take advantage of.
Perfect training for a job in government!
They told him he could not eat an entire motorcycle but he sure showed them!
Hey, don't worry so much. If worse comes to worst I have heard that Helicopter Ben is going to fly over campuses (and antifa and "X" rights demonstrations) and toss down to them fistfuls of freshly printed dollars with which to pay off their student debts.
If that doesn't work (and there is no guarantee that it will), I'm pretty sure that sooner or later enough angst against Russia can be generated through some as yet undisclosed psy op to get a generation of youth to willingly suicide themselves exorcising the perceived demon.
The quality of citizenry now produced by modern society, where parental responsibility has been ceded to bureaucrats, is surely as mechanical as robots anyway.
Hah! Thanks for that. If Steemit had a "comment of the day" feature, I'd nominate you. Thank you. I feel much better now.
The only thing missing was a reference to chemtrails, but let's not overdo a good thing.
As a small shopkeeper, I occasionally get a front row seat to the "quality" of today's recently minted citizenry... and the experience inevitably involves head shaking. Especially when one of them comes in to inquire about a job.
True story: One 20-something came in to ask about a job; having none to offer I nonetheless took a moment to make some suggestions of places I knew had open positions. The response? "Yeah... but I am really looking for something where I don't have to DO very much..."
Oh man that makes you loses a little hope for our future of survival. Sounds like bums down here on so many street corners. Sometimes people offer them jobs and they turn them down for similar reason “would have to do work,” or it ties them into having to be a reasonable citizen like paying owed taxes and bills. Where they see themselves making less money they are now.
There are even bum community’s down here where 5 to 8 of them get together and trespass on vacant lots owned by people in other states that never come down to check on their land. They will set up camps, fires, couches peoples toss out. Usually the land they do this on had fences put up to “protect heavy wooded area” since the landowner is nowhere around. So they use that as a way to hide what they are doing from view.
We used to have a couple of fairly high profile "buskers" downtown... being a merchant, I had conversations with both of them at various points and they both admitted that a "good day" during tourist season could bring them $80-120... cash, tax free, off the books. Compared to working somewhere for minimum wage, less withholding. They'd sleep outside or at the American Legion hall when it was raining...
In ONE of their defense, he was saving up to buy a used RV so he could have a place to live and travel. But that's an exception, not the norm.
I think that the answer to your question
Is Higher Education in the USA - Ripoff or Merely a Lost Cause?
is YES.
They're doing it all wrong.
for one thing Gender Studies, Peace Studies, William Shake Spear Studies, Dance, Philosophy, Disruption Studies, Theater Arts, Fine Art, Religious Studies, English Lit. French Food, Creative Writing, Golf Management, OneLaptop per Child , Fashion Design, Art History, African American Studies, Rennaissance Study, Winemaking, Antrhopology, Interior Design, Travel and Tourism, Film, Music Therapy, Psychology, Human Geography, Photography,Music, Fine Arts, Social Work, Ancient Greek, Sociology, Political Science, Hospitality Management, Journalism, Archeology, History, Geography, Communications, Hotel and Resturant Management, Astronomy Sciences, Law,International Studies, Economics, Feminist theory,
(pant pant...and the list goes ON)
in fact any college course than ends in studies is pretty much useless for finding a job.
Every major listed costs WAAAAAAY TOO much for what you get in college. the bang for the buck correlation is BAD.... It's either a hobby or better learned (much cheaper and much more applicable) OJT.
If it's not STEM it's a hobby.
are you willing to spend most of your life paying back the tuition for a hobby?
(and all of the above is WITHOUT even taking automation into consideration)
The people pursuing degrees in your list also seem to include a disproportionately large number of "eternal students;" the ones who are currently "getting their 3rd PhD," largely as a means to avoid dealing with life on any realistic level.
I swear, half those degrees were the result of some rich alum needing to satisfy their precocious kid... "We'll donate $10M to your endowment fund if you'll create a degree called 'Beanie Baby Studies'"
Money talks.
let em.
as long as I don't have to pay for ANY of it with tax money.
I think perhaps the "eternal students" know they'll never claw their way out of debt so they stay in the institution to defer payments, perhaps in the hope that one day they'll die before they need to pay up.
You almost had it! Except now a day you would want called it CryptoKitties because that’s the sudden new fad. Excuses me while I go face palm for a while slightly in a corner.
Yes, it is indeed a huge rip off!
Universities in Europe are as good and there is a social system that allow everybody to attend high education courses. If you are coming from a wealthy family and you have to pay high rate to attend university, you will never put yourself in such crazy indebted for the rest of your life.
American system is shit in the eyes of a European. Come get free quality education in Paris or Stockholm!
Regarding automation, agreed as well. Lots of job will be lost in 20 to 50 years. People will become more poor and inequality will increase.
I know it sounds pessimistic.
Oh, I know... I was born and grew up in Denmark; it was a completely different system. The system in the USA is broken in large part because the focus of everything is "how can we make money on this?"
It's not that "making money" is a bad thing, but when it is MORE important than "How do we best educate people" then it all becomes very backwards.
I am sure inequality will continue to grow, although I am also hopeful that some of the "Basic Income" projects will actually start to get going. Of course, the question always ends up with "Who is going to PAY for that?"
An undergraduate degree, unfortunately, is now pretty much a necessity for what we would call a "good" job. But yes, everyone does have one. And it's going to continue. So the college degree is now basically the high school diploma. The basic requirement to get a decent paying job with a decently stable company. So now when I hire people and I'm looking to level up my talent, I find I'm looking at MBA's and other Masters degreed folks.
And we've completely lost experience. I can find MBA's easy enough now, but they went to grad school right out of college. They've had summer jobs and internships where they learned to file and do data entry. But they KNOW nothing. They understand the buzz words, and they have a pretty solid textbook understanding of a P&L and how a business works. But they can't handle people situations, they don't understand the subtleties of doing business or getting along in the workplace.
It's a slippery slope.
A slippery slope, indeed.
And there's a "B-side" to it, as well. Aforesaid daughter-- who graduated 3rd in her class, followed by an honors degree-- is now an "investor relations specialist" at a large real estate investment trust. This morning, she was telling me that she mostly "sits around and files and re-files paperwork, over and over, because there's nothing else to do." She "outgrew" her last position because she could do the job of everyone in that office, better than they could, themselves.
In other words, hand in hand with this decline in capacity, we also have employers whose expectations are that (new) hires are little more than "desk decoration."
Agreed
MBA's and other Masters degreed folks.
got one..didn't help.
Not only is a master's degree required it has to be from the RIGHT college and courses taken from the RIGHT professors and you have to be a member of the RIGHT fraternities and the RIGHT....
so I gave up and drove a truck
made a million dollars in twenty five years.
(my expenses were a million five....)
I respectfully disagree, to an extent. I've never asked about professors or fraternities (aren't those just for undergrads?) when interviewing. School matters a bit, but really depends on the situation. If I'm interviewing somebody that got their graduate degree as a working adult, schools like Univ of Phx are pretty common. And I take that with a grain of salt, factor in that they probably have work experience and roll with it. Unfortunate that it didn't work out for you. Hopefully you enjoy your career despite it being second choice.
thank you.
actually considering my personality it was a perfect fit.
I can only image what would have happened if I'd had to work in an orifice.
..If Einstein lived now. he be a salesman at a mall or a waiter in a café
humaneness is fortunate to have benefited from Einstein before this
I purely HATE that picture of him.
He was a smart man...
making fun of him is degrading to the person who does it
it shows projection and low self esteem
Fortunate, indeed... you have a good point there.
Yes and Yes.
I encouraged my kids to learn trades. One went to college but also learned a trade.
Why Trades?
When you think of the future remove the computer.
What you are not going to see is a Plumber, auto mechanic, Carpenter and I am sure you are seeing where this is going.
As wonderful as technology is some things just can not nor will not be automatic because it takes tradesman to be able to get the job done.
Higher education promises nothing. My husband's great nephew has a PhD and the only job he can find at the moment is driving taxi in a large city. Of course he is trying to pay off the student loans. Another nephew is a homesteader and a master carpenter. He has no debts and is living very comfortable doing what he loves, when he wants to. It's all relative...
....And here in lies the sell - and the confidence trick.
An idea comes from someone.
IF that someone, is someone with a marxist socialist agenda, and IS playing the game in place for decades to push the said marxist agenda....
And IF that someone realizes that getting young people into debt makes them slaves, and at the same time filling their heads with postmodernist (marxist) dogma at the same time -AND GETTING THEM TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN BRAINWASHING...
And if that someone is a proponent of postmodernist relativism, with no moral compass of their own ( just the appearance of, to suit their position)
.....there is NOTHING noble about it.
There IS an immense amount of evil about it.
Humans - as a society - advanced pretty well up to the last 3 decades without higher education being a 'thing'.
It's almost like we didn't need it it all....
Maybe the whole premise of what it is - is actually something entirely different....
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/marxism-postmodernism-and-insanity