Current Events > College degrees are beyond worthless now

(+) Yeah! (+)

matchboxsantana posted...

what do you do?

@matchboxsantana I work in manufacturing

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Background_Guy posted...

Americans are taught from birth to only care about work. It's sad. If all you want to do with your life is work, you should be dropping out of school and getting a job as quickly as possible. Higher education should be for people who actually enjoy learning.

This is so backwards. I think you'll find a pretty significant overlap between advocates of (free) college and people who hate how much we work. I'd love to not have to work at all (or work way less) but until that becomes an option, if ever, going to college might be the next best thing for a lot of people. You go to college in the hopes that you can get a sought-after job that pays and treats you decently well, instead of being stuck in dead end shit hovering around minimum wage and needing to work 60 hours a week just to maintain a subpar standard of living.

Reminder that "college is worthless" is something college graduates started saying to convince people that the government should pay for their already highly profitable degree. It is left-wing trickle down economics.

Absolute galaxy brain take there. College grads make more money? Wow, I bet AOC doesn't want you to know that!

Say, that's a fairly flat line... I wonder what the loans and tuition costs have looked like over that time

https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32031/average-student-loan-debt-by-year/

Oops

CoorsLight posted...

Absolute galaxy brain take there.

incoming irony

CoorsLight posted...

Say, that's a fairly flat line...

Because it's adjusted for inflation, maybe try reading the graph!

CoorsLight posted...

I wonder what the loans and tuition costs have looked like over that time

So your link makes three really dumb points.

1. That total student loan debt has now grown to $1.6 trillion. That sounds bad! Except when you realize the reason for growing debt is not the cost of a degree, but a greater amount of people getting a degree. Americans are three times more likely to graduate from college today than they were in the 70s. College has become more accessible, not more expensive.
2. That median student loan debt today is $17,000. What does that degree get you? Median earnings for someone with a Bachelors degree are 75% higher than high school graduates, or $2.3 million over a lifetime. In what other world is turning $17k into $2.3 million considered a bad investment?
3. It then list the average price of a degree over time to show how drastically the cost has apparently risen except... it doesn't even adjust for inflation! Talk about galaxy brain takes! So is the cost of a degree really many times what people in the past would have spent? Not really:

https://twitter.com/jmhorp/status/1213150244160102400

And in fact the cost of a four year degree in recent decades is actually flat, even with greater demand and rising incomes.

Oops.

I know it's adjusted for inflation. That's my point, the value of a college degree has remained stagnant, but look at the inflation-adjusted cost of tuition table. It's 4x as much as it was in the late 70s