

Mike Rowe on the High Cost of College [video] - jspotanski
http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/12/13/dirty-jobs-mike-rowe-on-the-high-cost-of

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xdracon
"The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions
have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants.
What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was
previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs
of students, in the form of crippling debt."

[http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/](http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/tuition_is_too_damn_high/)

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poopsintub
Capitalism at its finest. If the Democrats have their way we'll be paying to
send every single person to college for free too.

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poopsintub
wtf was I thinking here?

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omarkatzen
The purpose of the college degree is to provide insurance against economic
change. Learn a trade, and you're good as long as that trade is valued (and
not outsourced). College is supposed to provide general-purpose skills that
guarantee residence in, at least, the middle class.

That's no longer true, because college degrees have been overproduced and
there's a shortage of people who (a) can actually _do_ things and (b) want to
do them.

The real problem, though, is that society doesn't train people up in the
trades (and help them relocate) when their jobs go away. They're just
discarded, and the fear of that happening is what keeps middle-class people
going into college-- which is designed to insure against the ups-and-downs of
specific trades (e.g. plumbing). Widespread college is a partial solution that
is now clearly failing.

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holograham
Why is there an onus on "society" to train people? Shouldn't the onus be on
the individual or perhaps businesses that need folks with unique skills?
(Think Ross Perot's famous training boot camps for EDS where they hired
teachers or English majors and taught them systems engineering)

It's the same concept in programming. No one learned COBOL and stopped (at
least most didnt). You are constantly learning new skills to stay relevant.
The business world is indeed moving faster and it used to be true that you
could learn a single skill and have a career (e.g. assembly line workers).
Clearly that is no longer the case and if you havent realized this you've been
asleep at the wheel of life.

You are right, college is not solely about learning discrete skills as it is
about learning efficient ways to gain new skills. I am sure most people on
hacker news would agree with my experience that the first 6 months of working
in the "real world" post graduation I learned more discrete skills than my 4
years in undergrad. However undergrad gave me a solid base from which to build
those skills on.

