The ugly fact that can't be mentioned is that college isn't for everybody. The uglier fact is that there isn't a ton of work left out there that can support a $40k lower-middle class income for those that don't have the capabilities to get through a rigorous college degree. They also tend to be hard, dangerous, dirty jobs that you can't realistically expect to keep doing once you lose your strength, youth, and health working them for 15-20 years. Also a problem, is that those who took that route sometimes didn't make it to 40, often not 50, and those that managed to hit 60 or 62 and could retire on Social Security almost invariably croaked shortly thereafter.

So, if there's a limitless fount of money to go to college, and there little realistic chance of a comfortable life without a college degree, and everything that you are programmed to believe through your primary education tells you that you need to go to college, then everybody is going to make an attempt at going to college. And then 40% wash out the first semester, another 20% after the first year, another 20% bounce around majors, take on extra debt, but eventually finish, 10% make poor choices and choose degrees with marginal prospects, and maybe 10% make it through the wringer with an acceptable GPA, and employable major, in four years or less.

Also, with unlimited money available to marginal students, the market expands to provide supply for that demand, and schools of marginal quality cater to the marginal students, offering watered-down programs. However, it doesn't seem like the watered-down quality ever equates to much of a watered-down price; there are many mediocre private colleges that are 75% of the tuition cost of a top-tier school, not to mention out-of-state tuition rates at public universities. So the general signal of having a college degree becomes starkly gradiated by where that degree comes from.

Maybe if you had to qualify for student loans similar to the way you need to qualify for a mortgage, it'd be a better system, as far as not saddling people with worthless degrees and mountains of debt. Aptitude tests a la credit reports. Having to justify the future earnings the degree would confer versus price similar to not being able to take on a mortgage to buy a property at vastly more than it is assessed.

Maybe if companies need college-educated workers in certain fields, they could sign contracts to fund that education, in exchange for binding employment for X years. Yeah, that is indentured servitude...

While this sounds like a complainy pants problem, this isa very real problem for a very large percentage of the United States. Without a 4-year degree as a de facto dues card, you are severely limited on your options.

At 34 years old, I could maybe have a degree by 40 while working full time and have to take on 30-60k dollars of debt to be competing for entry level jobs against 20-22 year old applicants (many schools now have programs so students can graduate simultaneously with a high school diploma and an associates degree). At my current income, if a degree could get me an extra 15% within a year of graduation, I would be in my 50s before I paid the loans off at current rates. That means I sacrifice the last half of my 30's to break even in my 50's and maybe make some extra money in my 50's and 60's losing out on 20-30 years of compounding interest because I don't have that arbitrary degree in anything as a dues card to say I'm worth hiring/promoting.

Blah.

Last year I made about 10% less than the year before because of zero overtime, our annual merit-based increases often are break even (sometimes not even break even) once you factor in inflation and insurance cost increases, throw in the constant nagging pressure of cancer risks (father died of it, mother had it, father's mother died of it), climate change, international trade issues which could see me laid off, automation possibly replacing jobs in the near future, it can often be quite crushing. Especially when you're trying to maintain sobriety and just want to run off into the woods with a cask of high proof alcohol and try and befriend a bigfoot to help provide food and shelter for you so you can die from Lyme disease or exposure living as a refugee in Bigfootville.

Meanwhile you see people with YouTube channels buying what equate to mansions (What's Inside, Jenna Marbles) and taking international trips monthly (What's Inside, Casey Neistat used to, on aircraft with seats in the tens of thousands of dollars a flight) and even crazy domestic trips frequently (What's Inside) and you're like, "Dude, I just want to make more than 34k a year".

I truly can't imagine what it is like for people that are consigned to working fast food/retail/service jobs as their sole source of income. It has to be all but crippling.

I think students could benefit greatly if high schools had a class about various degrees, career paths and their salaries. Kids are mostly just picking a track at random without knowing what it entails. I recall having a vague notion of being some kind of business man later in life so I decided to go that route. Thankfully it was boring enough to push me to computer science.

Given how many jobs have moved to cities nowadays I wouldn't be surprised if it was easier to get by without a car than it would be to not have a degree, and this is in car centric America

(I don't know how or if any of this could be accomplished.)

I completely disagree with that and I believe the opposite is true. Only people without degrees can speak reliably about whether they regret the decision or not. They actually put themselves on the line. I'm not convinced when I hear people with degrees say that they wish they had known that they didn't need them before or that they would have been just as well without them. That's like somebody who paid for flood insurance claiming "who knows better than I how worthless flood insurance is?" Perhaps the guy down the street who didn't buy it and lost his house.

Edit: And to the author's point about iTunes vs buying full albums- that analogy is faulty. There have been community colleges around for many, many years, but the reality is that companies just don't value individual coursework as favorably as an entire degree, particularly one from a prestigious school. The purchaser of a song has very different objectives than a hirer. A song purchaser wants one song and does not want to pay ten times the price to buy an entire album which might have three songs that he likes. Clearly, single purchases are more efficient.

But when it comes to hiring, there is no added cost. If I am hiring for a position with a stated salary, I want the most qualified person I can find. If I can hire a guy with three degrees in Computer Science from MIT, I don't really care about the guy with the Microsoft and Cisco certification, even if those are things that are precisely what you need to know on the job. College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. If you pull back and decide you are going to turn down MIT and go learn just the skills you need for your job, there are going to be 5,000 people lined up behind you ready to saddle themselves with debt and work through four years of college to get the degree and you will facing an uphill battle. So in the case of iTunes, a comparable situation is if I had $0.99 to spend on a song, and had hundreds of full albums with that song offered for my $0.99. In that case, I am not going to buy the single song.

I don't have a solution. I just see that I know plenty of people who have GREAT degrees, are very intelligent and are working in a field where their success is more defined by who they are then how they were educated. I think whatever solution we do have, needs to take a look at both the economy as well as the education system and how we prepare our young for a life in the workforce. Because at the end of the day that's what we're doing, we're educating our young to be able to step into our economy and profit.

Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Regulate jobs so that we force jobs to accomodate the degrees? Unionize alternate jobs so working at walmart / factories becomes profitable again? I don't know I just worry about what my children will do when they enter the economy and how will they stay in the middle class.

None of this is good.

By your own admission, you've learned little. You've put in just enough effort to pass your classes. You aren't seemingly interested in the field. And you're not motivated to learn more on your own in a field where knowledge is rapidly obsoleted.

The credential of a university degree was previously a signal of having learned about a topic, having worked hard in doing so, having interest in the field, and (at least in this field) being interested and/or capable enough to continue learning as necessary.

If it's no longer a strong indicator of these things, why should employers value it as highly? My own experience mirrors your admission here: fresh university grads frequently lack even the bare minimum ability that would be expected to be productive. Many don't follow this pattern, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And they get hired while the others don't.

It's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the ability. And if you have a degree but little ability, you're not getting the job. The focus on going to university should be about getting the ability, but it's become about getting the credential, even though the credential was never really the valuable part to begin with.

I want to be clear here that there's no judgment on my part of you or your character. You're doing what you think is best and/or necessary in your life and it's not my place to try and find fault with that. I'm only trying to point out that your approach seems symptomatic of a larger problem — and one that I don't have meaningful solutions for. I do worry though that just getting the credential won't be enough to give you the chance of success you're hoping it will, but I wish you luck regardless.

Or are you just jerking them around?

We've been down this road before. In the 1990s, everyone flocked to "CS" school to get in on all the sweet, sweet jobs of the future. Was the aftermath of that fun for anyone?

It is often read, on HN, that it isn't enough to just go through the motions of getting a technical degree. You need other qualities to succeed. The person with all the right qualities is rare. True enough. But does this mean that only those rare people with the right qualities deserve to live outside of poverty, or the imminent risk of poverty?

My father has a degree in political science. Fortunately, the economy wasn't broken in the 1960s, so he was able to get a white-collar job, buy a house, and have kids, like most other people with "basic" college degrees in the 1960s. Back then it was even expected that you could have a decent life with a mere high school diploma, or that GED you mention.

That doesn't work so well anymore. Is that a good thing? Be careful what you wish for. We are well on our way to building a society in which you can't have a middle-class lifestyle as, say, an insurance underwriter or medical records clerk without a college degree in a technical or professional field, or maybe an M.S. degree. I think that's a bad idea. Many people have more education than they need, and an increasing number of people have more education than they want (considering that they have to go into debt for it, up front). Forcing unwilling people to struggle through advanced degrees tends to produce a lot of stress and pain, water down the advanced degrees, dilute the pool of degree holders, and waste absolutely enormous amounts of time.

Oh, and it produces unnecessary barriers to entry. We could require all hotel administrators to hold an advanced degree in hotel administration. How does that sound to the AirBnB folks?

And all it does is buy time. In the end, jobs are as much about the demand for labor as the quality of the supply. Ph.D.s can be unemployed too. Highly trained semiconductor engineers can be unemployed. Automotive engineers are probably not doing so well right now.

Shadenfreude has an evil reputation for a reason. Please try to resist the temptation.

The reason why they insist on the 4-year degree, I suspect, is that labor costs are so high in the United States that paying the premium for a 4-year degree is negligible to your bottom line, so hey, why not save yourself the time of filtering through even more resumes and just demand a bachelors degree? It's not like college is going to make anyone worse at their job. As an added bonus, people who carry debt in the form of student loans or mortgages are less likely to strike or change careers - so it's a win/win.

But it's not. It gives a good indication that the applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I listed.

And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant training program or certification. Few people grow up hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so they're not going to go to school for that.

Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it tells an employer far more than they were "willing to spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to go to school to learn about something they love, then they get out and need a job.

I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree holders as a desirable criteria.

And let's be honest. Every school offering professional degrees is pretty much advertising, implying, and pushing the idea that if you come to this school, you will get a degree that will get you a well paying job. My school (Waterloo) does this with their engineering program (which I am enrolled in), and so does nearly every other 'top tier' engineering, law, and medical program. Granted, none of them outright say it, or promise it, but it's so heavily implied, that you have to cut our generation a bit of slack. Not that it completely excuses us.

They call it further education and not job training for a reason. College was never meant to train a person for a specific field but to make a person a more well rounded individual which would appeal to an employer.

It's no longer being sold that way yet it's still being ran that way which is why we are seeing a huge issue. For profits are taking advantage of people because they appear to offer the job training you would not get at a regular 4 year. Also thousands of recent graduates who are now working at places like wal-mart and the like are scratching their heads because truthfully they were lied to.

In terms of secondary education, after a dozen years of schooling young adults are launched into the world with exactly zero marketable skills. Zero.

What is the average US high school graduate good for?

Stacking boxes and, after training, making coffee and a number of other low skill/knowledge jobs.

This, from my perspective, is a travesty, a serious breach of the trust we place on a system of education that seems to have no ability to deliver real value for the money we spend.

At the university level we easily add a year or two to degrees by adding what I call “degree-irrelevant” courses.

An engineering degree should not have —as a graduation requirement— history, social science or non-technical classes.

Please note I said “graduation requirement”. You should not need to pass a class on Middle Earth History and Poetry to obtain an Electrical Engineering degree. This is silly and it wastes a tremendous amount of time and money.

Why do we have this?

Well, our secondary education sucks, so we teach and re-teach that which should have been learned in high school.

Worse than that, because the government is in the student loan business (and they are dumb as can be) the education “mafia” figured out how to fatten-up degrees to extract more money out of the system.

A history class is inexpensive to teach, and yet it costs the same per credit than, say, a chemistry class that requires more infrastructure. Degrees are padded with crap no employer values at all.

If you go to a university that costs, say, $30K to $50K per year, you likely have somewhere in the range of $30K to $80K in coursework loans that is utterly irrelevant to your degree.

The other angle is that, without this coursework we would be able to graduate engineers about 25% faster than we do, which would be a competitive advantage.

These graduates would start their professional lives with about 25% less debt. The lifetime benefits of this cannot be understated.

The opportunity cost, for the person and prospective employer, of taking an additional year or more to graduate people with technical degrees is, in the aggregate, massive in scale.

Someone might say: A well rounded education is important!

Absolutely agreed! Just not as a graduation requirement that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the already abusive cost of education and, in most cases, over a year of time to obtaining a degree.

This is where secondary education should shine. We should demand that young adults emerge from that system with both a well-rounded education and marketable skills.

Society would benefit immensely if we were better at the business of education, from K through university.

EDIT:

As one of many personal examples. Many years ago I hired an EE out of Intel. He spent around five years there designing switching power supplies. That's what I hired him for. He worked for my company for several years doing exactly that, designing switching power supplies. The fact that his US degree required him to take a bunch of irrelevant courses added exactly zero value to what he could do for anyone who might hire him, myself included. This means this person wasted a year+ of his life in school taking courses nobody cares about (and nobody will pay him for). A year later I hired yet another EE to do the same work. His degree was from Europe. He had nearly zero non-STEM coursework. He performed just as well, and in some aspects better, than the US-graduated EE.

I don't understand why we allow the education system to do things that are demonstrably detrimental from nearly every angle. If someone does want to study philosophy or history while obtaining a degree, no problem at all. It should be THEIR decision. And, if they think it might have future value to employers, they would get to highlight the fact that they took and passed such coursework. They could even opt to go for a minor in a certain area of study. Again, this should be the decision of the student and it should self-select based on the ultimate value assigned to such studies by society, not imposed upon every single student by a system with already ridiculous cost structures.