First time college enrollment down 21.7% in 2020

There is an ocean of college educated people who are working retail. Join the club. Rub elbows with intellectuals in a different kind of debt. No risk of injury. Its great. Your teenage employee will no show and you can sling burrito bowls on the line. You want a large data set? There is one.

They fell for "the degree" meme.

My wife specifically studied business, specifically dealt with an unpaid internship, and now works in a specific aspect of finance.

That is a far cry from all this magical crap "a degree" can do.

Mine does jack squat.
 
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I think we definitely need to figure out ways to make secondary education more affordable.

Aside from that, something I think @Bonsai Nut might have been alluding to, but hasn't really been discussed, is the fact that there are probably many kids who wanted to enroll in college in 2020, but could not or decided not to due to any of the following reasons:
a) They or someone in their family lost their job or got furloughed or otherwise lost income due to the pandemic
b) They have underlying health conditions or live with someone who does and did not want to risk COVID-19 exposure
c) There were a lot of question marks going into the school year about both the mode of education (virtual or in-person) as well as rates and severity of symptoms and impact from COVID-19 among the young-adult population.
d) Other pandemic-related issues (for example: public transportation, regulations and lawsuits about student visas, etc)

Whether or not our secondary education system is good is a whole separate casserole with a lot baked in it.
 
No degree here, bounced around jobs in early 20's and finally got my head on right and got a national certification in late 20's...started making 50+ a year and went up from there, looking to cap out 100-200 a year once i get to my retirement age which for me is 62, i will also have a pension and my investments. again no degree and no debt...My main thing is teaching my kids to know how to grow there own food, hunt/ fish, fix there own vehicle, fix there own home, etc. we need to know how to be self sufficient. just my opinion

everyone should have a garden

everyone should have a bonsai

now i sound like @sorce 🤣 no offense man haha
 
I used to be a superintendent at a large fire protection contractor. Our engineers all had bachelor degrees and very few of them made over 60,000 a year. Our journeyman made $32.40 an hour, three dollars an hour over that if they were a foreman. Plus company trucks. We had an excellent retirement package, and we paid zero dollars out-of-pocket for health, vision and dental insurance. Not to mention overtime. And if a fitter was willing to travel, six figures a year wasn’t uncommon. However it takes a toll on the body. Not one of the retirees I know hasn’t had some kind of surgery. I got out of the trade about 10 years ago and finished my degree in environmental science. I make about 20,000 less a year, but I have great benefits and a ridiculous amount of paid time off.
 
jimib said:
I used to be a superintendent at a large fire protection contractor. Our engineers all had bachelor degrees and very few of them made over 60,000 a year. Our journeyman made $32.40 an hour, three dollars an hour over that if they were a foreman. Plus company trucks. We had an excellent retirement package, and we paid zero dollars out-of-pocket for health, vision and dental insurance. Not to mention overtime. And if a fitter was willing to travel, six figures a year wasn’t uncommon. However it takes a toll on the body. Not one of the retirees I know hasn’t had some kind of surgery. I got out of the trade about 10 years ago and finished my degree in environmental science. I make about 20,000 less a year, but I have great benefits and a ridiculous amount of paid time off.
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Glad you brought that up.

I am a general foreman for an Electrical contractor in silicon valley, and didnt go to college. We are in the same boat- but our journeymen make 71$/hour, and all overtime is double time. Health plan is similar.

Some people like myself just arent cut out for college, and I am glad I explored the trades because it allows me to live a very comfortable life. Luckily I take care of my body and only worked with tools (as an electrician) for 10 years.

I might go back to school later on in life for personal enrichment like you, so kudos for that!
 
>>I think we definitely need to figure out ways to make secondary education more affordable.

Less demand should do it nicely.

People are lining up to pay for transgender basket weaving race theory dynamics in Andean cultures of the 1760s.

Yeah. That.
 
People need marketable skills. Students are customers to school systems, so volume is the name of the game. The curriculum advisors manage customers more than telling them the truth about likely outcomes of degrees in basketweaving. Of course degrees in endeavors that include a lot of thinking and very little doing will always appeal to the prospective literati. Thinking in an ivy-covered office of a major university is even more appealing. Maybe even write a book and become famous in addition to being well respected. And well paid, of course, with summers off. Nobody should be allowed to borrow money for schooling unless they present a want-add for the position they will be educated for. That would go a long way to bringing people back to reality. Many people never actually look at want-adds before they are about to leave college. Too little, too late.

Parents are supposed to train their offspring to make decisions. It would be nice if they got that job done by the time the kids decided what they were going to do following high school at 18 years old. Not sure what you want to do? Want to borrow money from a bank to buy something. The bank wants to know what you're going to do with their money, -come back when you know and they'll talk about it. Not sure how you're going to pay the taxpayers back for your education, come back when you are and we'll talk about it.

Fantasy Island is alive and well and I'm out in left field. However, nothing brings about change like abuse of the system to the point of extinction.
 
We're able to go to university for 3K a year. It used to be half that ten years ago.
Our system is Americanising: management layers are added, privatisation of entire school systems.
The worst part? People love American books. I paid 1200 euros for two(!) study books that had a huge print on them 'not for profitable sale in Canada'. Study books from my own country are roughly 15-100 bucks a piece.

Weird thing is.. Over here our janitors get paid as much money as I do working in human genetics. You can make a decent living here working at McDonalds. Not because our government pays the wage gap, but because we have peoples rights: if you work full time, you should be able to pay for a home, groceries, a small car and a family of three to four.
This makes me think it's not just the US education system that is rigged, it's everything else too.
 
A. Gorilla said:
Have adult expectations early.
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Yes. And.. Do this throughout university too. Many visitors are baffled when we say the student associations have a key to the building, run a bar in the basement and 24/7 access to our buildings, also without staff around. Without any problems. Because they know: You mess up, and all priviledges are whiped. We have very simple rules. The organization of an evening stays sober & needs to include students with our internal training in first aid & building management. No roaming the corridors at night: Only basement level parties. No externals allowed. On Monday no traces of the parties. This puts the student in a position where they need to be responsible.

A. Gorilla said:
College is not neccesarily job skills though.
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Depends a lot on the university I hope. If I look at my university: We have an industry advisory board for our programmes. Annually they make recommendations based on their hiring. I am now developing a new MSc programme, and half of my meetings are with HR/strategy managers of larger engineering firms that are expected to hire our graduates. Employability & transferrable skills are #1.

One challenge I see in these discussion is that many different types of schooling are possible, and require very different skillsets. There is a big difference in training students to become a mechanic vss academic mechanical engineer. And getting a PhD often is a ticket to a range of jobs not specifically in your own application domain, as many of skills are transferrable across domains, e.g., dissecting problems and critical thinking.
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
We're able to go to university for 3K a year. It used to be half that ten years ago.
Our system is Americanising: management layers are added, privatisation of entire school systems.
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Hm..
The real cost of education is A LOT higher though. The fees are mainly in place to give students the feeling that they are not getting it for free. If you look at the institutional fee, rather that the statutionairy fee you get a better picture of the cost. The difference is goverment subsidies for the programme.

For a technical master at my institute you pay E2143,= per year if you have european nationality, and thus eligable for goverment-subsidized rates. You pay E16.000 if you are not from the EU. So about 14K subsidy per student per year in that programme.

The catch is: universities are not allowed to just start a new programme: You can only start a programme if you can show market-demand for the graduates, which is not met by the current offers in the country.
 
No, your system is rigged and there will be some kind of comeuppance sooner or later. Providers of labor should be paid some percentage of the revenue or value generated by their labors. Workers that need higher skills, education, intelligence, dedication, effort, interest, ad infinitum need to be encouraged to obtain and deliver same to those who need their output by payment that reflects value and cost. Failing that, productive people will go elsewhere where they are paid what they are worth. The leftover people will not sustain society forever. Margaret Thatcher’s words will live on as long as socialism does, “Socialism works fine until they run out of other people’s money”.

Adam Smith will live on forever, too. The Wealth of Nations lies in the use of a nation’s resources, not just the possession. That’s the use of the true value of all resources which must be constantly replaced, or else. Only surplus resources can taxed away and used elsewhere, hence profits are necessary in every system.
 
I should probably shut up now, but there is one more part of the puzzle that needs to be described: everybody’s output is not worth the cost of independent living. In the olden days people lived in rooming houses if that’s all they could afford. As their value to society increased, they were paid more and lived accordingly. Just because someone wants or needs to leave the family and live elsewhere doesn’t mean that society should be required to subsidize that separate existence. Society everywhere has decayed in direct proportion to the acceptability welfare spending by the state. Children are encouraged to have self-esteem unconnected to personal responsibility for achievement. It’s backwards and disconnects the producers from the consumers. They should not be two groups separated by the state that takes from one and gives to the other. In the olden days they were all parts of the family unit with each member having a place and responsibilities that evolved through a lifetime. That has been destroyed by the state that allows young men to sire without fathering and children raising children at the state’s expense. It works badly. It’s an ill wind that blows good for no one, allowing people to live but only rarely escape and prosper. It needs to change and evolve back to the old model.

End of rant.
 
Pushing eighteen year olds into college and expecting them to know what they want to do in life, all the while committing them to a pile of undischargeable debt is the problem.

I'm an RN. The best RNs i know hold only an associate's degree, back when that was the thing. Now they require a BSN - two more years of fluff like " critical nursing theory" and BS classes that have zero practical application in our occupations. Just a way to funnel more money into the for - profit colleges that are popping up everywhere.

In all my classes at school, there was 1-2 older nurses with twenty years experience. These were seasoned, practicing nurses but state requirements forced them to pay for the privilege of learning about "transcultural nursing models" and other stuff that only exists to justify the salary of those creating it. Absolutely ridiculous.
 
Forsoothe! said:
I should probably shut up now, but there is one more part of the puzzle that needs to be described: everybody’s output is not worth the cost of independent living. In the olden days people lived in rooming houses if that’s all they could afford. As their value to society increased, they were paid more and lived accordingly. Just because someone wants or needs to leave the family and live elsewhere doesn’t mean that society should be required to subsidize that separate existence. Society everywhere has decayed in direct proportion to the acceptability welfare spending by the state. Children are encouraged to have self-esteem unconnected to personal responsibility for achievement. It’s backwards and disconnects the producers from the consumers. They should not be two groups separated by the state that takes from one and gives to the other. In the olden days they were all parts of the family unit with each member having a place and responsibilities that evolved through a lifetime. That has been destroyed by the state that allows young men to sire without fathering and children raising children at the state’s expense. It works badly. It’s an ill wind that blows good for no one, allowing people to live but only rarely escape and prosper. It needs to change and evolve back to the old model.

End of rant.
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I'm curious what time period of "the olden days" you think we should try to emulate as a society.
 
Mycin said:
Edit: gonna stay on track.
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I'm thinkin you should define what you mean by "unable to provide for themselves or their families" cause there are a hell of a bunch of people in this country getting hand outs from all of us (think your taxes) that shouldn't get one dime!
 
Peter44 said:
I'm thinkin you should define what you mean by "unable to provide for themselves or their families" cause there are a hell of a bunch of people in this country getting hand outs from all of us (think your taxes) that shouldn't get one dime!
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I agree, the handouts given to the wealthy are disgusting.
 
Clemson actually increased admissions this fall. (I just realized this was unverified. They'd planned on increasing admissions going into the final week before the fall semester started. I'm not sure I saw final numbers once the semester began.)
 
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