The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
This is really lowest common denominator reporting, on top of lowest common denominator sampling, and lowest common denominator question design.
A far better approach would be in trying to test for a specific hypothesis, e.g. "I believe confidence in higher ed is falling due to XYZ" reasons.
But, in the context of Gallup, I think this kind of research is really there not to answer questions, but to provide a sort of pre-signal to aide in hypothesis generation. Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
Gallup does good work, but this kind of omnibus question is not really meant to answer any questions.
Source: I work in B2B survey and interview research.
>Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
I would particularly like to see questions about "higher education" binned by field. I hypothesize that sentiment will differ most strongly between STEM and "X studies" fields, with the classic liberal arts subjects (English, history, etc) somewhere in the middle. I'd also be curious to know what the public knows about "the reproducibility crisis" or administrative bloat, if anything. And it would be fascinating to ask those with and without degrees, across 2-3 generations.
absolutely - binning and cohort analysis is critical here. There's also (at least in my mind) a very reasonable question about what "higher education" means. I think it would be extremely valuable to understand expectations for BA / BS undergrads, Technical colleges / associates degrees, Masters degrees in liberal arts vs social sciences vs STEM, and then Doctorates. I imagine people have not lost confidence in much of the apparatus of professions - e.g. engineering schools and law schools.
It would also be very interesting to me to map this against what people's perceptions were for graduation rates, scholarship availability, average student debt, and even the perceived impact that a school's endowment had on education quality.
There's a lot to know, but seeing the very basic trend exists means that there is something to look at.
Specific questions make for chaotic and detailed answers that don't speak to the bigger issues, because it fragments the pool opinions and allows the question crafter to push a narrative. This is precisely the kind of "scientific" nonsense that people are starting to realize and push back against. People with marginalized opinions have since learned the game and are starting to fall for it less and less.
Source: someone with a marginalized viewpoint and the target of "scientific" and institutionalized race-based discrimination.
This is useful as long as the sampling strategy doesn't change over time. With omnibus questions it can be a bit variable if the studies have some other motivation and the demographics are not consistent over time.
edit to add: if you looked at 40 years of this question, you would definitely want to control for the higher number of people with direct exposure to the higher ed system, since that base rate has been on a positive trend for a long time.
> "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?"
Confidence in higher education doing what? Leading to a good job? Making people better? Having a positive ROI? Being fun?
Gallup asks "how much confidence do you have in X", for business, government, courts, gods, etc. to measure sentiment. It's too generic to be meaningful. The trend, though, is interesting.
Related, but longitidunal studies have indicated that people's stated goal of college has changed quite a bit over time. 40 years ago it was much more common to see the answer of "to develop a philosophy of life" where now the more common answer is "to get a good job."
Yeah, until it materializes in lower rates of people actually going to college people at minimum folks seem pretty confident that it has a return on investment.
Also I'm honestly not sure I really care/put any weight into the opinions of random adults whose opinions of higher education are basically a reflection of how universities are portrayed to them in their news bubble. The fact that political affiliation not only matters but matters a great deal means it has little to do with the institutions themselves. I bet you could get the same results with "confidence in science" which is just as vague and nonsensical.
We reached 'peak university' (in terms of enrollment) in 2011. [1] I also would not say political affiliation matters, as confidence is plummeting for all groups. As for science, they seem to have stopped asking this question after 2021 (perhaps to avoid the temporary biases caused by COVID?) but Gallup has indeed had science as one of their 'confidence in institution' series of questions. [2] As of 2021 it had a total of 64%, leaving it as the ~3 highest rated institution. That's contrasted against 36% for higher education, leaving it somewhere between the church and medical system.
Don't think covid affected university reputations that much. Slogans like "decolonize maths" and skin colour based recruitment and award of degrees give me very little confidence even in modern STEM degrees from formerly prestigious universities.
These are niche talking point if you aren’t terminally online. Most people probably aren’t even considering politics, it’s just an issue of cost and roi. Degrees are oversaturated and insanely expensive.
Honestly, I think universities took their good reputations for granted, and so chose to pursue other goals than maintain them.
I don't think any institution can maintain the confidence of the general public without being scrupulously neutral on controversial things (or at least scrupulously respectful of all common perspectives) and staying focused on widely-shared values.
Probably has more to do with birth rates, but nevertheless its a good thing since these institutions of higher learning will be more accessible to people who are actually passionate about whay they’re learning rather than a bunch of people trying to check a box
Fertility rates are an interesting hypothesis, but looking at the data I think we can definitely say that's not the driver. In 2011 there was total enrollment of about 21 million. In modern times we're down to around 19 million. [1] Fertility rates have only recently cratered, and from 1990-2010 we were even pretty close to sustainability. That's relevant, because that's when most of all of the current student body would have been born. So there's definitely fewer children, as can be clearly seen in this population pyramid [2], but it can also be seen the difference is, at most, the low hundreds of thousands. And we're talking a difference on the order of millions fewer students.
An open question would also be the overall shift (if any) in international enrollment. If international enrollment has stayed the same (or even increased) then it means the decline in American enrollment could be even more extreme. By contrast if international enrollment has completely plummeted, it could go some way towards mitigating these numbers.
> The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%.
It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.
The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.
That demographic theory seems a bit feeble. According to the polling back in 2015 there was a slight bias but splitting by politics painted the same picture in a with minor adjustments. Then there was a massive realignment where suddenly the right wing "lost confidence". It isn't obvious why less-educated individuals would have no confidence in education either. That is like saying less-physically-endowed people don't respect height or muscle mass! People can respect what they do not have if it is respectable, and they can have confidence in things they personally lack if they are things inspiring confidence.
Although what the word "confidence" means here is a baffler. It is beyond vague.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted... seems very well said. There's this disturbing attitude in right wing media that almost celebrates people deciding to turn away from higher ed. It's like they actually want people poor and stupid
The one thing you don't mention though are the effects of free trade policies and immigration on their economic conditions
I think the general pattern here is a sort of self-reenforcing attitude associated with poverty. It's hard for me to look at more extreme progressives trying to eliminate high ability classes and not see some of the same thing
Ha, some of my most thoughtful and most balanced posts where I've put both sides of an argument have been downvoted the most.
Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.
From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument. Whilst irrelevant when it comes to my posts, it is important when scaled up to real politics. Voting out of gut reaction isn't helpful.
It seems to me that as gut reaction can now be manipulated so easily in today's world that it's a substantial reason why democracies and the democratic process are in such a mess.
> Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.
Probably a form of upvoting that represents "I don't really agree with you, but I don't agree with the downvotes either". That means many comments will start attracting upvotes only when they are greyed out. It isn't so rare for reasonable but downvoted comments to bubble back up to exactly +1.
> From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument.
It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous. Although in this case I'd guess it was the ranty tone of the comment and the lack of charity, evidence or argument beyond assertions were the major factors.
"It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous."
Right. That's why I reckon HN should give the poster (and only the poster) the stats for both up and downvotes. As often, I'll not watch the voting but only get to see the final tally many days later and to find it sitting on zero or minus one. One's left not knowing whether one's view was middle-of-the-road and received lots of votes either way or if it was just one downvoter.
Also, I'd like to see HN publish anonymized stats on how people vote, it would be interesting to know how many downvoters subsequently comment or fail to do so. Same with upvoters but I'd reckon downvoter stats would be more informative.
BTW, see my reply to throwaway7ahgb, I posted it before reading your comment.
Edit: in the time I've taken to write this reply my post to which you replied has been downvoted from two votes to one. There's been no subsequent negative comment in the interim. Point proved perhaps? ;-)
IMHO you should be downvoted for comments such as "It's not because anyone in the Republican party actually cares about any of this". This dismisses 100M+ people and their beliefs.
Right, I was making a general point, sometimes it's difficult to summarize succinctly in a few words.
It's why I rarely downvote a comment despite errors or political views (from my stance I much prefer to argue the point giving my reasons). That said, some comments are just so wrong and or egregious that it's obvious additional comments won't help and if posted they'd only inflame things further.
I've learned this from experience, on more than one occasion I've seen HN delete a complete thread (full length of the chain to the top) after I made a very reasonable reply to a very egregious comment posted somewhere near its bottom. The poster then took ofence and still others came to my defense and matters cascaded to the point where it was deleted. If I'd ignored the comment or just downvoted it then it's likely the thread would have remained intact. Trouble was many other intelligent comments were deleted in the process.
It's almost impossible to make generalizations on HN. You'll say "X is typically Y" and someone will always come out of the woodwork to reply "Well here is a case where X is not Y. Your entire point is invalid. Gotcha!"
Yeah, right. I will make one generalization though. I've rarely ever had a problem on purely technical points, either I acknowledge I'm wrong or we agree we've been arguing at cross purposes and it's resolved. Even one 'sticky' discussion that involved the controversial sugar substitute aspartame and the correctness of the Wiki entry was largely resolved when we agreed we were arguing at cross purposes. (As you likely know discussions about aspartame can get very heated).
From my experience, the point you're making almost always arises from controversial topics or ones that are or can be construed as political. For example, I remember when HN deleted a thread on veganism. Discussion started out civilized but eventually went ary after an extremist made statements that no reasonable person would have considered correct. Backlash followed from multiple posters and HN ended what was no longer a discussion but a heated argument.
I'm not that person, but the Pew Research Center says that, in 1994, 57% of Democratic voters were white non-college graduates, while in 2019, it was 30%. For Republicans, 68% of their voters were white non-college graduates in 1994, and it was 57% in 2019. The Democrats seem to have been shedding this demographic much faster than Republicans have been.
They do say that there's a relatively recent shift in voters who went to college towards the Democratic party.
The Republican Party now holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.
By comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education.
This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree.
I don't know if it qualifies as a shift, significant or otherwise, because I don't know how it was before. But a quick internet search for "biden trump voters education level" brought forth a few reports by news sites and research outfits.
According to Ipsos and Reuters about a third of Trump voters have a college degree or better. Pew has an more detailed analysis of voters for the 2016. 2018, and 2020 elections here [1], including education, which seems to confirm this.
There's extensive information on how this poll is conducted here. [1] It's a bit different than normal because it's not a one-off survey, but rather a long-term recurring polling. This particular series has been going for 23 years now. I'd guess they added the higher education aspects in 2015 (since that's when the graphs begin). Higher education took a really unexpected turn. We hit 'peak higher education' in 2011 [2], but everybody at the time was expecting it to continue growing rapidly as it had in the decades prior.
It’s sad that as an electorate, as a people, (even the democrats), show a lowering of “confidence” in higher ed. It means experts and scientists get ridiculed. It’s disgusting and sad.
Is this a harbinger of a failing empire? I think so.
Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they were just figuring stuff out as new info came in. Folks expected people to have all the answers to everything but the scientific method is to try something test the results and confirm with further experiment no?
That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust.
Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
It's funny because you're right about all those examples, and it's reasonable to point to them when explaining a loss of trust in science... But most of them are actually just companies or industries manipulating the public with shitty science for marketing reasons. Kind of a bad apple spoils the batch situation.
Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course.
Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit.
The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.
Most of the “fraudulent citations” stories you’ve seen were by non-US researchers. But nobody leads with that detail, because the goal is to cherry-pick bad behavior from across the goal in order to convince people that US higher education is entirely corrupt. It’s the same phenomenon that has half the country convinced that violent crime in US cities is out of control, when in fact a detailed analysis shows that it’s at historically low levels.
doesn't mean there isn't a lot of local fraud. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind.
Let's not forget that fraudulent Alzheimer's paper that misdirected Alzheimer's research for decades.
The Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fraud?
Does it matter if most come from foreign scientists, when prestigious journals publish them? What are we supposed to do, reject papers with foreign sounding names? Why aren't the journals doing proper vetting?
Attempts to suppress any counterclaims to the official scientific opinions during covid would make anyone skeptical.
Imagine I told you the US was overrun by violent crime and murder, and when asked for examples I listed:
* A single horrible murder took place decades ago
* A second (possibly less terrible) manslaughter case that took place in the 1980s
* A variety of violent acts in dangerous areas in developing countries, today
I’m not even going to dispute that there is academic fraud. Just that your examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is when one filters for reputable researchers, journals and institutions, and also takes into account the denominator (which is enormous) rather than highlighting some spectacular examples and making broad claims about the world falling apart.
Do we have good data to the contrary, though? Is there evidence that most science is good? The replicability crisis has certainly given some evidence that much of published research could be classified as 'not good' in some domains. (And maybe there is an important distinction to make between 'bad' science and 'fraudulent' science).
If there isn't good evidence to show that most science is good, the best we can probably claim is that we don't know.
I don’t think “there is an important distinction between ‘bad’ science and ‘fraudulent’ science” should have the word “maybe” attached to it. Of course there is a difference, just as there is a huge distinction between premeditated murder and accidental deaths. The correct level of both should be zero, but one is vastly more damaging and also more rare than the other. As an aside: the problem I have with the OP is that it isn’t arguing about scientific quality, it’s arguing that science is rife with actual fraud. Typically in the midst of such conversations the conversation switches from actual accusations of fraud to the replication crisis in small-effect-size social science experimental work, which seems to be more an issue of people being careless than malicious —- and importantly, is an issue that the scientific community is addressing through improved standards.
With respect to your question: “is there evidence that most science is good”, I’m not even sure how you would answer that question. All I know is that if you compare the world of my grandmother to the world of today, the two are so different as to be unrecognizable, and scientific advances are responsible for most of the difference. That progress continues every single day, and we’re both alive because of science was at least good enough to make our continued existence possible.
It reads like most of your issue is with my phrasing, which was deliberate to soften the comment so it doesn’t come across as accusatory.
>I’m not even sure how you would answer the question.
It should probably be answered in the same way we’d answer the converse. Something like “here is the data and the tests that show the data quality is high and the results are replicable.” My point was, if you can’t show that, then the claims that the work is good may not be scientifically valid.
To put a finer point on it, we know there is replicability crisis in many corners of science. But we don’t likely know how much of that is due to bad science or outright fraud unless we do the science-y work to check. And unfortunately many of the incentives are aligned against that very thing.
I have not claimed that all scientific work is good or valid.
The post I responded to said: “given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged.” I picked a bone with that given the total lack of evidence for the claim. More generally I have a problem with a broader class of people who make claims like this, since I find these claims unlikely and unjustified.
You came back to me with a different question: “how do we know that all science is good?” I genuinely don’t know how to answer that question. And bluntly, I think it would be incredibly hard to answer it: the question is up there with “how many grains of sand are there on the world’s beaches.” I do think that clearly science, in whatever state it is in, has historically worked amazingly well. The world we live in is a testament to that. Maybe the answer is that it doesn’t matter, that ecience has always been mediocre and yet we go to space and cure diseases with even low-quality science.
A more general answer is that everyone doing science is working incredibly hard to find the answers to hard questions. We are always doing so imperfectly, with imperfect methods and imperfect tools and imperfect brains and yet we soldier on. If you want to join this effort, either to further it or bring evidence to criticize and improve it, we are all excited to have you. But simply posing impossible-to-answer questions is not necessarily doing either thing.
>more general answer is that everyone doing science is working incredibly hard to find the answers to hard questions.
I think this is too romantic of a view. Yes, some (or even many) are working hard to answer hard questions. Others are seeking money, status and/or prestige as their top priority, just like practically any other field. It’s no different than saying financiers are working incredibly hard to create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It makes for a lofty narrative, but it’s also ignoring much of human nature.
And if you think that question is impossible to answer, it should at the very least give you pause to think about the confidence you have in your conclusion. Otherwise it reads as “I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” That’s dogma, not science.
In this conversation we’ve traveled trom “scientific fraud is rampant” to “you must somehow prove to me that all science is good” to “maybe scientists are human beings”. I think the first claim is made without evidence and I called the poster on it; the second is a bizarre goalpost-shift that I don’t think we have the resources to ever answer. But the third question is easy for me to answer: sure, scientists are human beings, with all their flaws.
But so what? What’s most interesting about the conversation we’re having is that even as folks make and fall back from specific arguments, the directional nature of the discussion doesn’t shift. All this tells me is that you don’t like scientists and are eager to land a punch against them, even if the punch is as weak as “they’re human.” This kind of conversation doesn’t have much value to me, since I can’t learn anything from it except that you have some strong emotions. But maybe it could be valuable to you?
>All this tells me is that you don’t like scientists
I think you’re extrapolating too much. Again, you’re making a strong claim based on limited evidence which is the hallmark of bad reasoning. I work in research and publish/referee articles regularly. I have no qualms with scientists, but I’m also acutely aware of how the system is flawed.
>I think the first claim is made without evidence
I get the impression you’re too riled to actually see my point so I’ll be explicit. We have lots of evidence that bad science is pretty widespread, especially in certain disciplines. We also have anecdotal examples of fraud. The latter is a subset of the former, with the remainder being good work. How big of a subset is it? Your claim is that it's small; my claim is we don't know.
There’s no goalpost shifting. All of the points made are related to the issue of fraud. Asking for evidence of your claim is not goalpost shifting, nor is understanding that fraud is a consequence of human incentives for status that exist in practically every domain. I simply made the point that we know there’s a problem, but likely don’t know the extent of it. Meanwhile, you made the claim that academic fraud is rare. And yet you also claim it’s impossible to prove that it’s not rare. It’s pretty clear that you’re not making a reasoned argument, which is the irony of someone defending the current state of science.
> Again, you’re making a strong claim based on limited evidence which is the hallmark of bad reasoning
I read back through my posts to find the claim I made that you’re talking about and I can’t find it. Please let me know what you’re talking about, maybe quote it. I’m gathering this has mostly become a troll at this point, and I’m sorry I kept responding.
>examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is
Given the fraud and replicability issues that have been shown to exist even within the most reputable institutions and journals, I think this claim needs some substance to back it up.
>this has mostly become a troll at this point
Please review the HN guidelines. They specifically reference assuming good faith and avoiding shallow dismissals. I’ve tried giving that to you by asking questions and giving you multiple opportunities to give evidence to your position.
1. The initial post made a strong claim about high levels of fraud.
2. I asked for evidence to support this. The evidence given was arguably very sparse.
The quote you shared is from my response to point (2). Arguably in a world of infinite pedantry it could have been phrased differently. For example: “given how relatively rate cases of fraud supported by actual evidence are” might have been clearer. However given the context I assumed that claims of scientific fraud would involve evidence.
This seemed a good place to end the conversation. Yet:
3. You came in and “judo flipped” the conversation to “aha; but what about the fraud that could theoretically exist but that somehow had produced no evidence of its existence. Perhaps these levels are very high!”
4. I said that evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove, given that it would require resources beyond those we currently spend on science to identify this.
5. And moreover I pointed out that we have never had the means to detect this evidence-non-producing fraud and yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits that we experience on a daily basis.
And thus this leaves us at an impasse. All science may be full of fraud and bad results that we cannot detect. Perhaps it always had been! And yet this has not prevented science from producing results that are enormously valuable. I am left with some questions:
1. What strategy would you pursue to answer your extremely difficult question, given that real-world resources are extremely finite. Please do not say “well, we just need to replicate every result” becayse this simply misunderstands the point about resources.
2. If we cannot devise a feasible policy to test your “perhaps science is full of fraud” question, what should we do instead? Is there an actionable policy you’d pursue?
My view is that strong answers to both questions are not so much interesting to me, but interesting in terms of whether your world-view has value. Surprise me!
>given the context I assumed that claims of scientific fraud would involve evidence.
The other commenter did provide some evidence (albeit anectodal) of obvious fraud. In the context of non-replicable studies, it can be as high as 2/3rds are shown to be non-reproducable in some domains. This includes some of the highest quality journals and institutions. There's quite a bit of evidence of this. Now I'm not claiming that is all fraud, but I am claiming we don't know how much of the problem is fraud.
>evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove
I disagree. I'm taking the point that it's not hard to prove, but rather the incentives are aligned against it. If data and methods are truly open-sourced, much of this can be proven. But there is little status or money to be gained from reproducing work, leading to a situation where we have a system where it is rarely done.
>yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits
I don't disagree, but I think you're are misinterpreting my position. I said the system is flawed, not that it's worthless. Put differently, it still produces good science but it's hard to separate the good science from the bad. The signal-to-noise ratio is potentially low, and the rate of publication exacerbates this. I would argue that boosting the signal-to-noise ratio by weeding out bad science could produce much more benefit because less time is wasted chasing trails of bad science.
>What strategy would you pursue
You keep framing this as some impossible scenario. I'm saying it only appears that way within the context of the current incentive struture. So my goal would be to create a change to that incentive structure. This is off the top of my head, so don't take it too seriously but here's what I would try:
1) We need to change the way academics are measured. Currently, it's a "publish or perish" paradigm that puts a premium on novelty and essentially disregards most everything else. There is also a glut of PhDs; far too many given the number of tenured academic position. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on a PhD to produce publications and this can manifest itself in pushing bad science. There's two things we could do to help this:
1.(a) Provide an incentive where reproducing research is valuable. Currently, researchers don't want to spend time reproducing studies because there's very little upside. They won't generally get published so it doesn't help their career. I would say we need to start giving more status to reproduction studies. Probably not as much as more "novel" studies, but there should be an avenue to publish them. Maybe a two-tiered journal structure where we have *Nature* and *Nature:reproductions*, where the latter is used to publish works that re-create the studies in the first. Metrics like citeScore could be weighted so that the novel studies give you a higher metric than the reproductions, but you still get some credit for either.
1.(b) Provide a pathway to also publish "non surprising" studies. In the current structure, research is more prioritized if it produces surprising results. Thus, if a researcher produces work that is unsurprising, they tend to just throw it out and try something else. This can lead to wasted effort when another researcher ends up doing the same thing. We should create an avenue to also publish "unsurprising" results. This has already started to get applied in some domains, like economics.
2. Right now, publications can hide their data. I think there should be a cultural shift where the highest quality journals make sharing the data and code a mandatory requirement. This ties directly in to facilitating the replicability as well as allowing others to look at your methods and see if there's any wonkiness going on (whether fraud or otherwise). Some of the issues of fraud that we've seen are because researchers couldn't hide their data because it came from a third party (eg, Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino were outted because their data was owned by an insurance company that was willing provide insight into the raw data).
3. Journals should set aside a portion of fees to fund replication. As it stands, journals get free labor from referees. I would argue this should be balanced by having some money set aside to fund a process aimed at replicating some of the studies in journal. It's wild to me that we have a system where a referee is expected to work for free and also to pay for a subscription to the journal they are helping.
There's other ideas about improving the referee'ing of the articles but this is already long enough for a forum post.
My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college.
I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.
I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.
Outside of global top 50, ROI decreases to the point where you start considering where it is actually worth it. That was at least my thought process back in the days when I was applying to universities.
Where I'm from, a 4 year stint in higher education is about as expensive as a month's wages. It gets more expensive if you need student housing, but many students can and do commute.
Most young folks can study something that interests them, at little risk. No one here has to worry about the ROI of their offspring's studies, nor do they have to worry about their prepubescent child starting charities (or whatever other insane nonsense) in order to qualify for some insanely expensive elitist college.
Seems like a much more sensible approach than putting a fuckton of pressure on kids in order to get them in a college which will land them with 30 years of debt on top of a potential degree.
Let kids be kids, and give students a chance to learn and explore.
I agree with this attitude as it was in the country I grew up in. However in the US often internships are the path to graduate jobs which is a much easier way into the highest paying jobs. The other thing is time, sure you can try something out for 4 years but doing too much education means you'll never get to settle down until your 30s at the earliest.
I completely agree! I should've worded my comment a bit better - "should I pay $40k/year for a school that won't open up doors for me in the future?" was the question that I was trying to answer back in the days. If it's cheap, or you can go without going into debt, obviously the calculations would be different.
I dont know man, my school is not a global top 50 but it was a public engineering school and the CS degree I got was extremely valuable. I think you are being too strict with that "global top 50". It depends more on are you learning a skillset that an employer can find useful?
I understand what you mean. Everyone’s path is different though. I went to an affordable state school around 2010 and my first job in the workplace was not glamorous.
It was a big manufacturing company that happened to have a small software division lol. I earned $60k in a HCOL state but that’s OK. You learn quickly when you’re a junior, and if you job hop a few times, it’s easy to land at a respectable software company after 4-5 years.
I now work at an employer that is a household name, and hires new grad computer science students from stanford, MIT, etc. Those new grads are a little smarter than me, but we still work at the same place. It’s OK…i’m not complaining. :)
I don't doubt that the effort required is immense.
But, you're talking about a collection of institutions that receive tens of thousands of applications every year. Just by pure numbers, it's clear that only a small percentage can attend.
And the fact that only a few can attend feeds their air of exclusivity, which makes their attendees stand out in the job market, which then causes more people to want to attend those schools.
I don't know if there's a way to solve this except by forcing people to stop caring about what school a job applicant went to. Which is kind of starting to happen but, in many industries like law and business it's still the norm.
It's harder to find someone in an elite university who completely lacks the technical ability to do their job. Of course they still exist.
But the advantage of hiring from one of those schools ends there. For every "top 10 university" student there are 10 more capable ones from another school, you just have to work a tiny bit harder to find them.
If you go to grad school nobody cares where you went to undergrad but they care a lot about research experience getting into grad school, and it’s easier to actually get research experience at a state school where the other students aren’t all also trying to get it. Most state schools guarantee admission to people with an in state AA degree.
I went this route, and am now a tenured PI at one of the most prestigious places in the world. I had several highly cited first author pubs in good journals as an undergrad at a state school. I was also paid to do that research, which made college almost free. I’m not going to put any pressure on my kid to “prepare for college” because it simply isn’t necessary and just makes you miss out on being a teenager.
The sad truth is parents think putting massive pressure on their kids will make them smarter, or more skilled at things that lead to a high paying or prestigious career. Unfortunately that’s not true… if they have the aptitude to succeed they will do so without the pressure. If the pressure makes the difference, it means a miserable life doing something they don’t really like and aren’t very good at but were forced into by their parents.
Thanks for this. I think the same but I never went to grad school so I'm wary it might be the last step instead of the penultimate one. Its hard to get out of the Ivy mania as well.
Setting a goal of getting into a "top 10 college" (whatever that means) is pointless. The admission rates are so low that even for students who check all the boxes it's still a lottery ticket. And there's not much difference in average lifetime earnings between graduates of those schools versus the next tier down.
Which is particularly crazy because there isn't very much of an earnings premium for going to a top 10 college vs a "rest of the world" college. The big gap is between high school grads and college grads, not between graduates of more or less prestigious colleges.
Realistically, most people are average. One of the biggest changes I've seen since my childhood is that everyone seems to think they can be a rockstar at something. Obviously only a few people get to do that. I think there's been a distortion in life expectations.
How much do people care that you went to a top 10 college?
I'm sure it depends on your field: in mine (academic science, which is as plagued by name-dropping and elitism as any) the thing that matters is the last thing you did.
Of course the whole thing is a trajectory. If your goal is to climb the ivory tower (it probably shouldn't be but anyway...) you need to be lucky or rich at some point. But if it doesn't happen at at undergraduate admissions you just have to do actual work, and then get lucky at some later point. So yes, it's screwed up. But that's not my question.
What I want to know: how often are people getting hired based on their undergraduate institution beyond their first job out of collage. Is this a thing? In what field?
Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a high correlation between schools I’ve heard of and those I haven’t. Schools don’t need to be top 10, but top 100 seems to help a lot. And this is for programming jobs.
It seems to matter to those deciding where to put their early-stage venture capital. Granted, that's not why most people are going to college, but it's too simple to say that it isn't used as signal.
I'm the opposite. I went to the literal closest college for what I wanted that happen to be a top 10. Even over a decade later people care. They mention it to me. I have a suspiciously easier time getting callbacks in economic downturns.
I won't make my kid kill themselves to get into a top 10, but only people who haven't gotten the glow of a top university think it doesn't matter.
16-21 is a super hard age. I have no idea what affect that kind of credentialism will have, maybe it just ends up delaying the growing pains that take place. Which might not be a good thing because high school and college are more forgiving than what comes after
A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back.
The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.
I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.
It depends on the size and terms of the loans. I still pay about $75/mo at 3.8% for my loans (20 year later). Going away to college was far, far, far more valuable to me (in terms of fun, adventure, etc) than the cost of that monthly bill.
Right, like I mentioned. If you understand the loan and your ok with it then go to college. If you don’t know basic finances or how interest compounds then sit home until you figure things out because your playing with fire.
No it is not! I was appalled years later to learn that government-backed loans were being given at such high rates. It just seems cruel. The government has no obligation to turn a profit on student debt.
If you're in the US, the government isn't really profiting on school debt. The government guarantees the debt, but that is a play to protect the banks rather than to drum up profits. Profits really don't matter to a government that can print any money it needs but doesn't currently have.
Depends on when you went and whether your loans were federally backed. 9% for recent students is possible but pretty high; federal undergraduate loans in the past 10 years have been ~3-5%. (Private loans can have much higher rates but represent a relatively small fraction of loans and loan balances. [1])
The real crime was tricking these kids to go to out of state schools for $60k a year that offer the exact same curriculum as their in state school going for $12k a year.
Especially for computer science. If you need 4 years and 60k a year to learn how to do a Left join in SQL or what OOP is then you are better off using that loan for an actual investment. You can just get 4 years of experience instead and be more marketable.
You had the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program that you can apply towards any out of state school. Also most private school aid packages are very good, if you are poor you will probably get a full ride at a school like American or GW.
TAG is $10k/yr at the max and continually threatened by congressional defunding. The different between in-state and out-of-state at most public schools absolutely swamps this difference - for the public schools I got into, it was $40k difference in in-state vs out-state.
> Also most private school aid packages are very good, if you are poor you will probably get a full ride at a school like American or GW.
entirely orthogonal point - this equally applies to any poor student, doesn't matter that you live in DC. anyone who wants to go to a public school has access to this
People still live there and the lack of a public school still affects them. Now I’m kinda curious if DC residents get in-state tuition in Virginia or Maryland or Delaware?
We have a program that contributes $10k/yr towards the difference. We don't get in-state for any of the nearby states and $10k/yr generally is not enough to cover the different in modern state schools.
When I was in this position, it was basically only economical to go a private school for undergrad.
right, my only point was that not everywhere in the US has a good/affordable state school you can go to. when asked for an example, i gave the example of where i grew up
College has a positive ROI in most cases, despite the high price tag.
There are exceptions like the people with useless $200K degrees working at coffee shops, but you have to ignore a lot of common sense to get that far. For most people, college really does have a positive ROI.
These are kids, and I'd say in most cases, parents are making the choice to take out excessive loans on their children's backs so they can feel like successful parents without paying the price.
Exactly, this is why you I’m happy the younger generation doesn't listen to us. We listened to generation x and got into a lot of trouble for it. I knew parents who would encourage 100k of debt for their child for an art degree..
I don't really think that's it. When I was in high school, I didn't see my parent's or my friends' parent's success and think "I've got to go to college". I was busy doing what most kids are doing: having fun with my friends and trying to get close to the opposite sex.
What made me think I needed to go to school was the constant inundation from counselors and teachers that my options were college or a mcjob. To a kid that just wakes up one day every late summer and walks into a new classroom without doing anything to make it happen, it seems like college is just the next high school. It's just what you do. Nobody, ever, not once, talked to me about the financial aspect of it. Lucky for me I didn't wind up going beyond a month at a community college which I quit for other reasons, but without those reasons I'd have continued with it because I, like most people my age, didn't know what to do with myself. I had a rough time after that for a few years, but today I can say that I am financially and in general living a much better life than my peers who went to college, and I have a few that also didn't go and several of them are doing wildly better than me. I don't know a single person that went that isn't stuck on a treadmill trying to play it safe and pay down debt. That's their lives, they'll get old on that treadmill, and mine is mine alone.
Long story short, yes, from my observation, most people are tricked. The only people that need to be going to college are people who want to be in medicine, lawyers, people that want to go into academics and do research as a career, and people who's families can afford to give them a liberal arts education just for the sake of it. The rest of us are better served just starting to live our lives.
Ah yes, teenagers who have never lived in the real world should be able to predict that their future would turn out to be entirely different than the pattern that their parents & parent's parents followed, and that they were explicitly told to follow, and that said teens are still told to follow by almost all socially important institutions and leaders.
So the teens are rebellious when convenient to label them as such, and sheeps when convenient otherwise?
They are adults choosing their life's course. They are not children. They have responsibility to think for themselves, and to accept the consequences of their choices.
college debt is crushing because they chose to have it. They could've gotten into apprenticeships instead, or a community college which costs less.
There are opportunities in high school to discover whether studying higher education is for them. The parents also have a role to play here - paying for extracirricular activities to test out or discover their child's talents and interests (which, of course, is only affordable for the wealthier parents - a form of inequality of opportunity, and have nothing to do with blinding going to college at any cost).
So no, i do not agree that the "children" are not to blame.
Would it be ok with you if i didn't take teenage rebelliousness seriously as well? And, in fact, if I considered it another strong piece of evidence that teenagers are in no position maturity-wise to predict large scale social trends a decade out?
and yet at that age, they would be tried and convicted as adults if they committed a felony.
so, i dont agree that just because they're 17 that they're not capable of making decisions that require planning, gathering information and rational thought. It's just that a lot of them aren't doing it, and play the victim when the inevitable results aren't desirable.
They cannot point to their parent's generation and say "i did what they did, why don't i get the same outcomes".
I think most school systems have failed to teach how to do research and critical thinking. Information has been around now what decades... Just go on google and search your degree. Read some horror stories and some success stories and evaluate them for yourself... Form a worldview...
That is where entire school system should take people. Give them tools to make at least someway reasoned decisions. If they love something, they can do it, but know that there might not be greatest financial rewards involved.
I agree with you to an extent. The problem is they weren’t taught finances at all. Most kids don’t understand that just 5% annually can compound to a crazy amount.
I don’t feel bad for the current kids or anyone who grew up with the internet because they know better. If you have an internet connection and didn’t research loans before taking them out then that’s on you. The new gen or the iPhone generation as I call them are much smarter than us because they see most millennials got a useless degree and work somewhere unrelated. Which is why they don’t listen to us but I don’t blame them. Good on them.
In my experience they were taught finances but were little shits who didn't take it seriously or pay attention at all. Then the exact same people years later complain about not being taught.
Naw. There were a huge number of scam colleges taking advantage of people who didn't know how to evaluate them. That was a consumer protection issue. Scam colleges are a wholly different thing.
Higher education is not a great filter anymore. Everyone goes to college - and most students simply don’t have the fundamental intelligence for it to mean much. Colleges have also changed - there are large numbers of activist degrees that seem to not really be serious fields. People get degrees in such fields that aren’t economically valuable and then struggle in the job market. If you’re studying something that personally interests you but isn’t useful to others (as the job market suggests), aren’t you just doing a hobby?
And then there’s all the cultural stuff. Colleges are political mono cultures, and increasingly have abandoned liberal values like free speech for an authoritarian, violent attitude towards any view other than the progressive left. In other words, they lack diversity. Maybe not by skin color or whatever but certainly of ideas. Same with faculty.
The author should also mention the increase in competition in the labor market and the lack of labor protection laws to prevent outsourcing. Statistically speaking, a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings. A lot of the negative sentiments I conjecture come from the higher standards across the board and the ubiquity of a bachelor's degree in the labor market.
> a 4-year degree still yields a higher ROI than just a high school diploma in lifetime earnings.
How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment? In reality, a person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Perhaps you are mistakenly comparing people situated in different places on the spectrum, noticing that colleges reject/fail those who don't meet a certain "calibre"? Indeed, I think we intuitively understand that the kid with down syndrome, or some such condition, is, statistically, not going to make it in college and is also going to have limited earning potential once joining the working world, but there is little evidence to support that handing them a college degree provides a cure.
> How can that be given that incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment?
They haven't; real incomes and the spread of real incomes have both increased over time. (That is, both median real income and the ratio between any given higher-than-median percentile and the median has increased over time.)
> A person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
It is tautological that people on the same place on the income spectrum earn the same regardles of other factors, but having a degree has a substantial effect on where you are on that spectrum.
If you are talking about something else, it would probably help to more clearly articulate your meaning.
> real incomes [...] have both increased over time.
This does not seem to be the case, at least not when observed over long enough time periods to filter out the noise. Looking at the earliest income records we seem to have, incomes were on par with what we find today. Wages have increased, which is perhaps what you meant, largely because they are a comparatively recent invention and had nowhere to go but up. Of course, now that most incomes are derived as wages, wages have reached the point of stagnation as well.
> having a degree has a substantial effect on where you are on that spectrum.
The spectrum is that of humans, not of income. Clearly someone with, say, down syndrome is not the same as someone without. To think that people are all the same is erroneous. Indeed, someone who has down syndrome is statistically unlikely to succeed in college and, likewise, statistically unlikely to do well in the broad economy. –– That does not imply that attaining the college degree they lack will cure what ails them.
> If you are talking about something else, it would probably help to more clearly articulate your meaning.
Help in what way? I understand what I am articulating. If you are, perhaps, implying that someone else might not understand, that is certainly possible but affects me not. There would be no logical reason to seek to improve clarity in the case.
Every property constructed dataset I have seen shows incomes have increased greatly. Increases in taxes, Healthcare spending, and housing spending, and others have consumed most of that growth.
> Every property constructed dataset I have seen shows incomes have increased greatly.
Sure, but I was talking about Canada, the "most educated nation" according to the OECD, which, importantly, crossed the 50% attainment threshold a long time ago. The USA only did so recently.
In the interest of fairness, it might be too early to see the big jump we're told to expect in the US data. I am a little surprised you reached for it for that reason. If we're not too early, then I am still surprised you reached for said data. The data shows a fairly consistent growth trend over the span of decades, with no instantaneous growth of any substantial amount to account for the point where the degree was obtained. Perhaps you mistakenly linked to the wrong datasets?
That said, it is telling that US median income has risen – quite significantly, really – even while the median income did not possess a degree. Which, frankly, echoes that the relationship trying to be painted earlier isn't actually there. While we can try to be fair, you and I both know there won't be a big jump in the median income to account for the US median income finally attaining a degree. The idea that a degree would provide increased earnings doesn't even make sense.
What does exist is college filtering mechanisms (entrance requirements, academic rigour, etc.), which have traditionally kept out those who aren't destined to earn much in life, but that, again, doesn't mean attaining a college degree is a cure for what ails them. Indeed, in a given cohort, it is statistically likely that top performers who succeed in everything they do in life will also succeed in college and in the economy in general. But what does that tell us? Don't be born into life problems? Not exactly actionable.
I was intending to address your statement specifically about lack of real income growth, not any underlying causality with degrees. I brought it up because it is often stated as fact here in the US, and has a large impact on Collective sentiment, but is not reflective of reality.
I agree that the topic of education is much more nuanced. There are obvious factors such as the types of degrees, their utilization, and ultimate productivity that need to be taken into account. Less obviously, there are factors like the changing composition of national production it's relative specialization with respect to the global economy. Please make it necessary to evaluate the impact of Education against a counterfactual where education is held constant at a national level.
Similarly, I would argue that the education to outcome statistics that are often trotted out are misleading due to uncontrolled confounders and intrinsic differences in the groups that go on to receive various levels of Education. That is to say, there are likely many differences between the average person that gets a post-secondary degree and one who does not complete Primary School besides their educational attainment.
> A person in a given place on the spectrum seems to earn the same regardless of whether or not they have a degree.
Real income to GDP ratio has been stagnant by some degrees but in this case, we're only looking at average IQ on a normal distribution, average as in 85-115 (or whatever the official range is), assuming that's what you mean by 'spectrum'.
e.g. for the average {IQ} or whatever metric you meant in a person, he/she will earn more compared to the same person ceteris paribus, but without a university education.
Humans are way more complicated than IQ. Someone with a high IQ but little ambition is not going to go far in college nor are they going to go far in the economy.
People over time is the only reasonably reliable measure we have. And the data is clear: Statistically, people did not start earning more when they started attaining college degrees.
I like to refer to higher education as legacy education. As someone who skipped college and jumped right into the workforce after the dot com boom, I was renting an apartment/paying my own bills/managing my own affairs by the time I was 21. I had to figure everything out on my own. I was making 60k/year in a big city maintaining websites and helping the small media company I worked at with IT problems. My comp is in the high 200s/low 300s these days. No formal education.
When I talk to college aged family or friend's kids, its completely opposite. They are willing to take on 100k+ loans for a major they know nothing about, their parents manage everything for them (my 21 y/o nephew still gets his prescriptions and doctors appointments managed by his mommy), and they think becoming student 34,000 at some mediocre state school is the path to success. They are young - its not their fault, but we need alternative voices in this discussion. Young people should be taking gap years - go work an odd job away from home, learn to live on your own, rent a place with some friends. If you wanna get drunk often, or expedite your serfdom to a FAANG or Goldman Sachs, go ahead, but it builds little character.
I will be encouraging my children to do something memorable - go work for the national park service, work on a fishing boat, work in food/restaurant service in some tourist town, start your own small biz, apprentice under a craftsmen, etc. If you decide you want to go to a corporate rearing center, they aren't going anywhere.
I think youre 100% right. Taking it further, it's legacy education because there are no effective gatekeepers to information anymore. You can learn anything you want now for free. If the goal is to learn how to do something you want to do, universities aren't worth the expense. They gatekeep credentials now, not education. I personally do not think that status quo can continue for very long.
I've talked to my oldest son, but it seems the younger generation already has figured out that the path leads nowhere. I didn't even have to explain it to him, he already knows. I think that, for those that want to take a beaten path, youre absolutely right, they need to take a year or two off and live in the world a little bit first.
Ok, but you do realize that living on 60k in a large city is not particularly easy these days? You'll be putting down half your salary to rent, at the minimum. Same applies to the other jobs: sure, you build character. But you're also perpetually one car accident away from financial ruin.
Higher education is personally very challenging and not how people were designed. Even those with some standard deviation above the mean aren't meant to study books all day.
This becomes evident now that there is more and more instant gratification around slot machines disguised as social apps.
It is not about a student loan but about investing hundreds of hours of intellectually challenging work, either stressful (unstructured learning) or highly disciplined (planned learning).
In earlier years, say the 1990s and 2000s, there was no FOMO. Going to university was work—white-collar work. You were either qualified to take this route or not, and degrees were needed to enter specific job markets, mostly better paid and without physical demands on your work besides sitting.
When the bachelor's degree was somewhat democratized, the baseline sank: differentiation was gone, and a degree was no longer exceptional.
Now, you face the question of why you should invest years into education that "There is an app for this" can handle within milliseconds. The old funnel of education towards more yield took a hit.
When I graduated from eighth grade, we had to choose a graduation song. A classmate laughingly suggested Pink Floyd's “We don’t need no education” and I seconded it. Our teacher dismissed the idea in a way that offended me, so I turned it into a big argument about freedom and dignity. It became a shouting match.
The authorities ended up choosing a song from the Muppet Movie, instead.
I didn't even like Pink Floyd. I think I had heard the song once before in my life. But I did think it would be funny to sing it at graduation-- ironically, of course-- and also as a reminder that education is all about helping kids become functioning adults who make choices for themselves, not drones who pretend to feel and believe what the elders dictate.
I'm sure the class would not have gone with Pink Floyd, but I wish our teacher had let us go through the process of debating it properly. Then it would have been our decision.
I suppose this comment is not that relevant to the article, but what the hell. You only live at least once.
It seems all the concerns boil down to economics. I don't think people did nearly as much cost-benefit analysis in the past. The fact that college was affordable meant you were freer to experiment and enjoy yourself. Now that the price is so high, it entails pressure to get your money's worth. Thus creating a vicious cycle.
Unusually, I don't think "all economics" is the right take. The political aspect of this seems to be significant. Education isn't being seen as a neutral path for people who are bettering themselves, these poll figures suggest it is a politically active institution.
The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market, where government regulation suppresses the supply of accredited universities. I think we're seeing some change with the latter supply (e.g. community college, online degrees, etc) but demand for a U.S. college degree still stands strong on the global market from international students.
It would be nice to get data on yearly university applications and do an empirical analysis on supply and demand.
> The increase in price probably comes from a combination of demand for college education and some monopolistic competition in the accredited university market
I think you're missing a big factor, rising admin spend [1].
It is all of the following factors: restricted supply, price indifferent consumers, free credit, on-academic competition between colleges, high regulation, and administrative bloat.
If you set these factors aside, there is no reason people couldn't get a legitimate bachelors for a few thousand dollars a year.
you could literally run an engineering program using class recordings from MIT and Stanford out of a community center like AA meetings.
I'm not so sure it's a cycle. Ultimately, employers' requiring a college degree for more and more jobs is what drives the increasing demand, and the increasing demand results in increasing prices. And employers require a college degree because they need some kind of coarse selection screen, and don't seem to have any other way to distinguish capable applicants from incapable ones.
Am I missing something here? The figures quoted in the opening paragraph suggest to me that confidence is rising.
> Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
It is confusing because the author was really messy with her use of the figures to where that sentence reads nonsensically. The actual Gallup news article that is cited by the article posted is much clearer. The posted article reads as if it was just a re-arranged/scrambled word salad of the original article to the point where some parts no longer make sense.
The original article makes it clear that while the current figure is 36% for those who have quite a lot of confidence or more in higher education, in 2015, that figure was much higher at 57%. The little to no confidence now is 32%, while in 2015 it was only 10%.
The poll data itself helps to clarify. It went from 10% answering very little/none to now 32%, and 57% great deal/quite a lot down to 36%. That's a pretty big shift.
Looks like there is a "some" option. For some reason the author quotes one number from one year, a second from the other, and ignores the third option in both. Ignore "not sure" respondents in polls at your own peril.
I personally lack confidence in higher education because I'm neurodivergent, and high school pushed a method of learning that is not compatible with the way in which my brain works. They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate - it is the source of the "how will this ever be useful later in life?" that is oft-cited of students.
I am extremely resourceful when given access to a search engine, but I cannot read an entire textbook and then recall specific information from it. I only retain information that is actually relevant to my task and I can't decide relevance after the fact. They don't understand this and don't accommodate for this, so I had to drop out.
I have no reason to believe that college is different. Even if it were, I don't feel that I need it! To graduate high school would've been nice, but it's not really worth it for me now. Real high-paying jobs do not care about the presence or absence of a high-school diploma if you can prove it doesn't matter. At least in software development, programming/engineering skill usually speaks for itself.
I have to wonder if others are realizing this about themselves, too, or at the very least feeling it. Certain people, I'm sure, would be able to tell if, in general, learning and information-gathering is quite easy for them, while school is hard for no good reason. The internet is a wonderful thing; sure social media is terrible, but just in general we're all now quite spoiled and it's obvious that we could have it much better than school.
I think most people learn the same way you describe. But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work.
I think if you do that it all becomes much easier. Interestingly I think this impacts people in their careers more than school even. People fight against so much stuff in their careers rather than seeing the more straightforward path toward their own success.
"But people who are good at school are good at modeling school so that it looks like what you describe. And they go on and do the same thing with work."
...And many go on to become teachers and textbook writers thus perpetuating the problem for students who absorb information differently to the way they do.
We need multiple approaches to teaching, unfortunately they're not seen as conducive with efficiency, minimizing syllabus material, keeping teachers' numbers to a minimum, etc. (See my comment to the same post.)
"They They demanded I learn things in advance rather than as-needed, which is not how I operate..."
I think this is true with many people, myself included with some subjects (or certain topics within subjects).
That said, with some topics I found the subject matter sufficiently stimulating in and of itself to hold my complete interest and attention. For example, I immediately grasped the fundamentals of calculus and understood why it is so important.
I cannot say the same about linear algebra and matrices which I was taught before knowing why they are so important in physics and elsewhere. Frankly, back then I found it to be boring, tedious stuff. Now I'm aware of its proper context and use my attitude towards the subject has reversed completely.
Same when it came to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in physics, they were a bore and a pain (I was much more interested in electrodynamics and such). Similarly, my attitude to thermodynamics has changed completely, I'd now argue that thermodynamics is one of the most important (and fundamental) parts of physics. Had I been taught why thermodynamics is so important and given interesting instances I'm sure my attitude would have been very different.
Also, I was never much good at learning foreign languages, I recall whilst still at school doing my homework. I'd lie on my bed and bash my head against my French textbook whingeing to myself and asking why the hell am I learning this damned stuff. That attitude changed completely when I went to live in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language.
In some ways I've envied those students in my class who could suck up information like a sponge and regurgitate it verbatim during examinations. That said, I had no trouble equalling and often bettering them in topics that held my intersest. More to the fact my fundamental understanding of the subject was often much stronger.
You're right, teaching subject matter to students that's seemingly irrelevant for them at the time it's taught, is, in my opinion not only counterproductive and often a waste of time but also it's likely to turn potentially good students away from the subject altogether.
From my experience, when teaching a subject including context and relevance is just about as important as the subject matter itself. The trouble is that the people who set the syllabuses and write textbooks are so often the very same people who were good at regurgitating stuff verbatim in exams. They become teachers because of said skill and they never fully understand that many students simply don't learn in the same way that they do.
> In some ways I've envied those students in my class who could suck up information like a sponge and regurgitate it verbatim during examinations. That said, I had no trouble equalling and often bettering them in topics that held my intersest. More to the fact my fundamental understanding of the subject was often much stronger.
Anecdote: It was difficult for me to learn algebra at first because things like the phrase "plug it in" (wrt variables) were never defined, only demonstrated. They expected students to simply infer by watching and following along. But once I finally figured out the fundamentals, I could use them to engineer my own solutions that rivaled what they wanted to teach me, and at that point I instantly got bored with most of the lessons (and went from hating math to loving it). At points they had to ban me from using calculators, mandate me showing all work, etc. because they realized I was being far more efficient than they wanted. That's when I really got upset about it.
See, the mistake they made is assuming that I didn't need a fundamental understanding in order to simply regurgitate the subject material. They expected me to learn purely by example and then work purely based on their algorithm. They did not expect me to require complete base knowledge, and once I had that knowledge they did not expect me to use it to engineer my own solutions. That was their second mistake; assuming that I would learn and apply only what they were trying to teach me.
My personal hypothesis is that school wasn't designed with autistics in mind. Learning by following along without explanation is traditionally a neurotypical thing. Autistics often learn based on rules and in fact don't always benefit from merely following along if they can't infer the actual reason behind something. I'm sure a lack of attention to this detail is a huge reason why autistics are often viewed as having "special" needs rather than simply different ones.
"See, the mistake they made is assuming that I didn't need a fundamental understanding in order to simply regurgitate the subject material"
Right. I don't consider myself expert in how people learn stuff or acquire knowledge but speaking for myself I'll almost certainly remember it if I understand it.
A slight qualification though, there are many 'minor' facts that I've understood at the time but have eventually forgotten or I've only partially remembered them. This is especially so if I hold little interest in the subject. (It's known the mind clears dross out if it isn't reinforced or used.)
What I'm talking about are key concepts or processes in a subject that one is expected to know and retain. For me, I'll much better understand a topic if it's taught in context (why we should learn it) and or if it's of interest to me.
Here's another example from math: at school I recall learning parametric equations and I quickly caught on and understood them because I'd come to the conclusion that they are a really neat and cleaver way of solving stuff that would otherwise be difficult. Here, the learning reinforcement was of my own doing—not because the teacher has stressed this part of the syllabus more than any other part. The info stuck immediately because I could visualize how useful they were.
> What I'm talking about are key concepts or processes in a subject that one is expected to know and retain. For me, I'll much better understand a topic if it's taught in context (why we should learn it) and or if it's of interest to me.
Absolutely. I agree, and I think this is also the case for myself. Context is very important to me, and it sucks that it's often completely left out. Often, when I ask "why?", I'm treated as if I'm completely refusing the subject.
People act this way outside of school, too (for example, I'm often treated this way at work), so I think it's just a neurotypical thing that I'm expected to do what I'm told without question, even if the question is curiosity / confusion.
>This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
This tells you just how much more public opinion is steered by discourse and media than by any real numbers. Compared to 2015 objective changes in anything relevant to the college experience is pretty marginal to non existent, costs aren't higher than they were a decade ago[1], save for some select schools which again, dominate the media.
There's a similar phenomenon where confidence in the economy basically just correlates with who is currently sitting in the White House.[2]
I think any "American's confidence in X" at this point is basically an almost useless metric because it's simply split among political or news dietary lines.
When tuition was $1000 (which it used to be in 1970) no one was talking about how getting an English degree could be a catastrophic financial decision. At worst it was a waste of time.
Instead of funding universities and managing them like we should be, we handed them over to MBAs who seem to charge more and more every year for the same degree.
Obviously federally-guaranteed loans are an idiotic solution to a self-inflicted problem.
Long ago, I was told that it was only worth paying for College if you were going to be an Professional Engineer or a Nurse. It seems that advice has held true.
Fun fact from Poland:
Here a real "Professional State Licensed Engineer" degree (anything outside IT) is absolutely NOT worth it because the market for most jobs is local.
Only Software "Enginneering" (with or without degree, doesn't matter) is.
I do have a masters degree in computer science (software engineering specialization) and since I'm working as a contractor from the start nobody ever saw it or wanted to see it.
I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree.
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
You only end up 100k in the hole if you eschew your perfectly good public in state option. That's part of the reason. Public colleges recruiting at high schools out of state are straight up doing it in bad faith.
> I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid.
Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that.
Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1].
I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years.
They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived).
The in-state cost of most of the UC's (University of California), including books and room and board, are hovering around $40K per year now. I could easily see someone racking up $100K+ in debt for four years. My kid has ~7 years to go before we have to swallow this, and I'm expecting that figure to be over $200K by the time she goes.
University degrees should be good investments that pay huge dividends for time and tuition, they largely are not. University degrees should confer a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life, they largely do not.
They have become certificate mills where people generally don't care about learning anything but just are looking to pass the test and get the credential.
I have known way too many people with degrees who just can't think for themselves and who either learned a very specific set of skills or really none at all.
The other side of the equation is mindless algorithmic HR hiring practices though, where a college degree is treated much the same as a vendor training certificate.
The way people are often handled is mindless, as if all you're capable of is what is on your degree, regardless of experience or skillset. There's also the creep of totally unnecessary degree requirements even in managerial and executive levels, to pad institutional materials and argue for even higher salaries. In the professional realm it acts as a form of rent seeking, artificially decreasing supply.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but part of the reasons why people seek out unnecessary degrees just to learn a specific set of skills is because it's demanded of them by HR and hiring teams, or regulations.
When employers just want to see the credential, then students will just do what it takes to get the credential. And so many employers (needlessly IMO) use the credential to gatekeep access to professional jobs. Employers have turned universities into shams where you pay $100K, wait four years, and pop out with a paper that says "I can be employed."
i use to play with the idea to provide books, a bed, laundry and food for free. Periodic tests serve only to throw you out. Nothing fancy, a basic meal.
If you want to sleep eat and read for 50 years that should be fine. If there is no burning desire to apply yourself, engage the world or even just write a book we are probably better of without it. You can be the helpdesk for other readers in stead.
Well since the 1970s the official policy by the US govt is the STEM pipeline is for making more STEM workers. Broad perspective is basically 50 years by the wayside. It’s completely intended and unsurprising you know few with liberal independence.
You get what you measure for and well, good luck measuring abstracts like 'a broad perspective, independence, and the skills and knowledge to make one truly free to pursue their ambitions in life'. Especially when you never ask what their ambitions in life were, or if they are anything remotely achievable or assisted by college. In that light is it any surprise that instead of getting the mother-and-apple-pie you get certificate mills?
> According to a new Gallup poll, Americans are losing the thread with higher education. Confidence in college has taken a nosedive, with one out of three poll responders claiming they have “little or no confidence” in higher education. This contrasts sharply with a 2015 poll, when 57% of those surveyed claimed to to be fairly or “very” confident in the old hallowed halls.
This paragraph shows why. 1/3 having little or no confidence now compared to 57% fairly or "very" confident. Without knowing the magnitude of the middle choice, is this even comparable?
It doesn't help that this is two paragraphs down:
> 3) an unpromising job market with diminishing returns for un-STEM professions and 3) the many tortured varietals of “free speech” discourse.
Ok, it's probably a typo, but still, not confidence inspiring.
Also, why is "very" in quotes, but "fairly" not?
It's too bad they don't hire proofreaders anymore. That used to be a job you could get out of college.
You shouldn't even need a college degree to proofread mainstream news, which is written at, what, a 5th or 6th grade reading level? K-12 Schools also share the blame for not even remotely educating their students.
What’s clear to me is that our feeling about University is a bit like the Anna Karenina quote: Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In other words, a lot of people are unhappy with college, but everyone has their own ax to grind about why.
I will say that I have never experienced any ideological purity tests that conservatives are constantly complaining about. Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.
> Maybe that’s because I mostly took math and engineering classes.
The second you step outside of the stem bubble into liberal arts courses, it's like woke everything
Now I will say, there's good woke and bad woke.
I had one class that was about sociology and demography of the US-Mexico border. The professor was very respectful, etc etc. Seemed like useful history lessons for someone about to move to California or the southwest
I had another that was about the pre-kantian post-scholastic era of western philosophy, the professor didn't actually try to teach, showed up late, when she did show up it was some lecture about feminism. Left a permanent bad taste in my mouth
So you have happened to finish the grade in US without publicly saying the following words even once - "all races are equal"? It sounds too unbelivable.
Making a zombie from a human is very objectionable for me even if the content of perpetrator's speaking is legit. If your learning environment suffers from a censourship too much to have an ability to say "I don't want to live with Muslim family in one neibourhood" in school so why the big bro insists the students to say something about race situation? The school got to teach but it also loves to shape.
That moment the higher education took a HUGE swandive into the empty cement pond, is when their admission no longer relies on SAT/ACT.
Soon, LSAT and others to follow.
It is like the state no longer demanding an occupational license, leaving consumers rudderless in getting quality workman.
I for one will only be checkibg for medical degrees that have SAT and MCAT admission in force policy. This act only disservice those hardworking and legitimate grads.
Why teach kids stuff that will be obsolete by the time they come of age to work?
AI is going to do to most subjects what calculators did to arithmetic, and desktop publishing did to cursive writing. Is anyone learning their times tables and calligraphy today for everyday use?
Sadly, star trek had it right — once you’re hooked up to the borg hive mind with neuralink, it’s not even clear what any individual has to add to “the collective”.
I would be willing to bet that applications per student are way up on a long term timescale.
It’s the same thing as the job application problem. When it is as easy as having a form autofilled and hitting submit (even if there is a moderate fee), you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.
It is like saying people are eating less at restaurants in last few years yet Michelin star restaurants have 3 months waitlist.
Obviously top rated stuff has high demand and low supply. Further if students are finding lower rank universities less worth the money, many of them would try even harder to get in higher ranked ones.
Not necessarily. As others said, could be caused by increasing number of applications per applicant, or foreign students. Or maybe increasingly important reasons to graduate from top school that have nothing to do with actual education. If in 5 years AI can do most jobs better than humans, how can a middle class young adult advance up the social ladder?
More students are applying, probably. 50 years ago, you had to go to some trouble to apply to a college; you couldn't just do it online. Also, 50 years ago, they didn't have hordes of international students applying from around the world, but today that's common in American universities.
"...but today that's common in American universities."
That's correct and to some extent it's had a deleterious effect on education. The primary problem however is that money—the finances of education—has become as important or even more so than education itself. 50 years ago education had more intrinsic worth that it does today. Well, anyway, it did with those who controlled the politics and thus the pursestrings.
Also, the college prep and tutoring industry has been ballooning in the US. Historically, Chinese companies dominated this market in terms of consumer base, but we'll probably see a continuation of this trend in the US too as universities become more selective and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where the more selective you become more students/parents will consider you as more "elite".
I have acquired both trade and university/academic skills but most of my career has involved the latter.
When employing my trade-learnt skills I apply myself in a quite different manner to that when I'm working in my more formalized profession, and in some ways I've found that way of working more enjoyable. Achieving or creating things with one's hands can be most satisfying.
About 40 years ago trade-based skills such as woodworking, metalwork, tooling, crafts, etc. that employed a large percentage of the workforce fell out of favor and that a career that required a college/university education was seen to be more financially rewarding. This resulted in a huge increase in the numbers who attended college/university.
Leaving aside politics, I think it's time to reappraise our educational needs, and we should stop looking down upon jobs that involve manual work/dexterity as we've done in the recent past. Moreover, we shouldn't forget that until the age of high tech and automation most work was of a manual dexterous nature and productively therefrom provided most of our needs. Not all but much of that is still relevant.
I know what I'm saying flies in the face of modern automation, computerization and smart working, etc. And I acknowledge that my view is counterintuitive given current trends in today's world.
Nevertheless, from what I've observed, many, many people don't want or have need to know the intricate workings of advanced engineering and technology, or unfathomable facts about the physical world such as why α is ≈1/137. I'd thus suggest that in many instances a university education has not necessarily been the best fit or outcome for many people.
Perhaps it's only now that many are beginning to realize the benefits of acquiring an advanced education are just not worth the time and effort not to mention its inordinately high cost. And to some extent we now may be seeing a reversal of the problem we had before the current trend of seeing a college education as a necessity—that's where many who were suited to a college education were unable to receive one through lack of finances and such.
Little doubt the picture is more complex than I've painted it. Irrespective, I'm not for a moment arguing or agreeing that we should dumb down education in any way. In fact I'd argue the opposite, which is that we need to better educate and train people in ways that most suit both their abilities and personal traits/personalities so they lead more fruitful lives.
Furthermore, I'd argue that as a society we need a better understanding of both the educational needs of individuals and those required by society for it to function properly, and that this is urgent because of major changes and developments in manufacturing, with the impact of AI and other significant changes within society. These changes are already having a profound impact on what people do and how they go about doing it. It's all the more urgent we address these issues now because change is occurring with ever-increasing rapidity.
I'll finish by saying that for the benefit of both those who are being educated and of society generally we must dispel the somewhat elitist notion that's often seen in academia and by many employers that those who work in the trades are doing low and menial work and that they are so employed because they are either incapable of more advanced academic work or are otherwise unsuited for it.
Such notions aren't helpful for many reasons but the most obvious one is that they skew the numbers of those who go into trades and professions and the impact of this skewing is negative. Also, it's important to stress that many trades require considerable training as well as the development of excellent skills together with lots of experience, especially so if they are to be performed well. Essentially, much work that's now deemed as trades-based is far from being menial.
Next, some of the smartest people I know work in the trades and I'd put them up against many who've more formal qualifications. Also, from my observation, many of the people who I've encountered who are happiest and live the most contented lives are trades people.
Higher ed was the driving force for a lot of the protests etc was bound to be “punished” for lack of a better word same with Hollywood the devil works hard but farm boys work even harder
Maybe ed industry has become too regulated to have a chance to be useful? There are a lot of things even a private school can't teach children, for example: government's taxes is just an aggression, proprietary software is evil even if this is "required" by some teacher or institution, history lessons is just propaganda, god is an undefined value etc.
The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.