Topic: The (probable) Coming Higher Education Bubble Collapse

[trapeze]

Here is an interesting article (scooped up from AoS) about the likely fall of higher education.

Among middle- and upper-class Americans, almost every intelligent, hard-working person attends college. Knowing this, many employers use college as a cheap and efficient sorting device and consider only college graduates when hiring for professional positions.

Not having a college degree sends a negative signal to employers. Unfortunately for professors, this signal could dissipate. To see why, consider an extreme example in which students go to college only because of signaling concerns. If something happened to cause fewer highly capable high school graduates to attend college, the stigma of not attending college would slightly decrease.
  
But as this stigma fell, fewer people would pay for college, which would cause the stigma of not going to college to fall further, which in turn would reduce the percentage of highly capable people who went to college which would…. In a world in which college functioned purely as a signal of quality of the graduate, the percentage of people who attend college could quickly plunge.

Apart from the highly technical and science related disciplines, a college education is about 90% BS, especially given the extreme leftist bias of the faculty. Indoctrination is bad enough in the K12 public schools...paying through the nose for it in a university is either stupid or masochistic depending on your point of view.

The BO admin, predictably, has been assaulting technical schools in a futile attempt to stop the coming collapse of the higher education scam but they may as well be trying to stop the tide from rolling in.

This is one collapse that I am actually looking forward to. The other one is, I hope, the collapse of the public sector unions and the bloated federal make work sector.

[IronDioPriest]

The debt required for a kid to attend a "good" school (read; having perfected the art of Leftist indoctrination to a higher degree) is awfully huge for someone whose prospects of getting a job to pay it back are being strangled by government.

[trapeze]

It's as much a supply/demand thing as anything else. Too many college grads waters down the value of the degree.

I once went to a local high school to see if there were any soon-to-be graduating students who might be interested in an internship/apprenticeship with my company. I spoke with the principal and the guidance counselor. The guidance counselor told me flat out that he would never recommend such a career path for their students because, "if you don't have a college degree then you are a loser." I told him that I wasn't a college graduate and that the taxes generated from my business were paying for his little social engineering experiment and promptly left the meeting. Idiots.

College isn't for everyone. Some people are never going to respond to education. Others just don't need it to be successful, some wildly successful, in the private sector. Our country was built by not a few people* who didn't even have a high school education. I never cease to be amazed by the arrogance demonstrated by those in the education racket.

*Thomas Edison had no formal education. He was partially home schooled by his mother and largely self educated.
Bill Gates never graduated from college.
Mark Zuckerberg never graduated from college.
Extreme examples, I know, but there are millions more where they came from, just not as phenomenally wealthy and successful.

[Pandora]

trapeze never graduated from college; Gunsmith never graduated from college.

Neither of my parents went to college, nor did Gunsmith's.  I wouldn't call either couple the Bill Gates version of wildly successful, but they each worked, bought (and KEPT) houses, raised three kids each (two of those six graduated from college; my brother owns his own business) and kept out of debt -- and without government "assistance".

My Godson is going to an auto-tech school.  My sister slapped him on anti-ADHD drugs pretty early and he's still dealing with the fallout from that whole affair; no way he'd make it through college anyway, so what he's doing suits him perfectly.

I got a job with Western Union in the late 70s by passing a test so simple (math/English) I didn't even need scratch paper for the math part.  By the time we got to Calif. in the mid-90s, no one would hire me, for a job I'd been doing for ten years, because of no college.

College degrees began to be required when it was made clear by groups eager to sue that the unequal results from interview tests were unacceptable. 

[AlanS]

I got a job with Western Union in the late 70s by passing a test so simple (math/English) I didn't even need scratch paper for the math part.  By the time we got to Calif. in the mid-90s, no one would hire me, for a job I'd been doing for ten years, because of no college. 

Proving you were over qualified.

[John Florida]

Highschool only and never looked back.

[BigAlSouth]

Yes, college is not for everyone. That being said, college was for me, a means to an end.

While at my little liberal arts Quaker college, I was taught to think and analyze. I was challenged every single day by my professors, many of which were Quakers, to state my beliefs and back them up. It was, without a doubt, four of the most exciting, challenging and rewarding years of my life. I attended a school that my parents could never afford because I was rewarded for years of hard work with an athletic scholarship.

Sadly, many of my friends during that time, burned out with too much partying and not enough studying. I observed at that time that the students who had a financial interest in their education (paying their own way) performed better and took the oppertunity more seriously than the trust fund kids whose parents paid for everything.

[charlesoakwood]

"College degrees began to be required when it was made clear by groups eager to sue that the unequal results from interview tests were unacceptable."

I've never had this thought nor read it  , it is startlingly rational.   

 

[trapeze]

Yes, college is not for everyone. That being said, college was for me, a means to an end.

I'm not exactly putting down anyone who went to college. I am putting down the education lobby that says that everyone should go to college and is entitled to go to college.

Some people are just plain not qualified to go to college. They screw things up for those who are. If you are paying big bucks to attend college it is unfair to have a certain percentage of under performers (idiots) in your class, wasting everyone's time. And yet, that goes on a lot thanks to affirmative action programs that are more interested in diverse skin color than academic qualifications and performance.

Then there are people, such as myself, who went to college, did well, but ultimately decided that it was not a good fit...that there was a better way for them.

The education lobby, the diploma mills, have no interest in what is best for individual students or for the student body as a whole. They are interested in draining as much money as possible from whoever is footing the bill whether that be a student, the student's parents or, as is more frequent these days, the federal government (taxpayers) via loans and grants.

They purposely oversell their product (in most cases the BA) which devalues its worth for the purchaser. Thirty or forty years ago a BA had some value in the marketplace. Today that seems to not be the case. The education lobby (acting in character) is saying that the masters degree is the new bachelors degree. What a shock. It won't be long before everyone needs to earn a doctorate for a college degree to have value.

[Libertas]

Yes, college is not for everyone. That being said, college was for me, a means to an end.

I'm not exactly putting down anyone who went to college. I am putting down the education lobby that says that everyone should go to college and is entitled to go to college.

Some people are just plain not qualified to go to college. They screw things up for those who are. If you are paying big bucks to attend college it is unfair to have a certain percentage of under performers (idiots) in your class, wasting everyone's time. And yet, that goes on a lot thanks to affirmative action programs that are more interested in diverse skin color than academic qualifications and performance.

Then there are people, such as myself, who went to college, did well, but ultimately decided that it was not a good fit...that there was a better way for them.

The education lobby, the diploma mills, have no interest in what is best for individual students or for the student body as a whole. They are interested in draining as much money as possible from whoever is footing the bill whether that be a student, the student's parents or, as is more frequent these days, the federal government (taxpayers) via loans and grants.

They purposely oversell their product (in most cases the BA) which devalues its worth for the purchaser. Thirty or forty years ago a BA had some value in the marketplace. Today that seems to not be the case. The education lobby (acting in character) is saying that the masters degree is the new bachelors degree. What a shock. It won't be long before everyone needs to earn a doctorate for a college degree to have value.