NBC: Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college

[dismalist]

I found this Freakonomics podcast about public transit to be illuminating.

Transit is one of those capacity constrained public goods. It's efficient to charge for this service.

The rest is redistribution. Poverty is lack of money. To alleviate poverty, give the poor money.

More money for education, more for transit. No, more for me! :-)

[The podcast is quite bad, I think, except here and there.]

Back to German: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/germany-9-euro-ticket-ending/index.html

Being a railfan myself, I knew about that. It is a foolish move, justified by emissions reduction. There has been standing room only.

The idea is to substitute from cars to rail. Fine. But to do that efficiently, you don't want to increase transport overall, which a subsidy does.

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

[Wahoo Redux]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

[dismalist]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

[Wahoo Redux]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

More easy answers!!!  Wow.  You've got it all figured out, huh, B-Dig. 

I think you are looking for Newsmax, my friend.  They also have all the easy answers.  And they too are really, really concerned with "the poor."

[dismalist]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

More easy answers!!!  Wow.  You've got it all figured out, huh, B-Dig. 

I think you are looking for Newsmax, my friend.  They also have all the easy answers.  And they too are really, really concerned with "the poor."

Apparently complex problems may well have simple answers. 'Ya just gotta have the right theory. :-)

[Wahoo Redux]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

More easy answers!!!  Wow.  You've got it all figured out, huh, B-Dig. 

I think you are looking for Newsmax, my friend.  They also have all the easy answers.  And they too are really, really concerned with "the poor."

Apparently complex problems may well have simple answers. 'Ya just gotta have the right theory. :-)

All we need is the "right theory?" 

Damn.  Why didn't anyone tell us about this earlier!?!?!?

Big-D for Prez!!!!!

[dismalist]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

More easy answers!!!  Wow.  You've got it all figured out, huh, B-Dig. 

I think you are looking for Newsmax, my friend.  They also have all the easy answers.  And they too are really, really concerned with "the poor."

Apparently complex problems may well have simple answers. 'Ya just gotta have the right theory. :-)

All we need is the "right theory?" 

Damn.  Why didn't anyone tell us about this earlier!?!?!?

Big-D for Prez!!!!!

And yours isn't even wrong! :-)

[Wahoo Redux]

The efficient way to curtail global warming to impose a carbon tax. Then everything falls into place by itself.

Golly!  Who knew it was that easy!?

I did, and I always have, and many others always have. It's technically easy, even to design such as to not hurt the poor. It's just, just, just ...  the people and their elected representatives who resist.

I infer the worry about global warming is a charade, intended to get cash for special groups.

Like the worry about education.

More easy answers!!!  Wow.  You've got it all figured out, huh, B-Dig. 

I think you are looking for Newsmax, my friend.  They also have all the easy answers.  And they too are really, really concerned with "the poor."

Apparently complex problems may well have simple answers. 'Ya just gotta have the right theory. :-)

All we need is the "right theory?" 

Damn.  Why didn't anyone tell us about this earlier!?!?!?

Big-D for Prez!!!!!

And yours isn't even wrong! :-)

WAAAA-HOOOOOOOOO!!!!

[mahagonny]

A likely reason:  https://nypost.com/2022/08/27/us-colleges-bias-hotlines-lead-to-campus-witch-hunt-culture/

Which is one reason to be against the loan forgiveness giveaway for colleges. They should get their house in order before they deserve any tax funded breaks. Maybe if a few more of them just closed, and they would be prompted to figure out why, for example, there are something like six entering female students today to four male ones.

[Stockmann]

Who cares what other countries are doing!?

For whatever reasons, our situation is what it is.

....

Specifically, how should we administer your meritocracy? 

Should all Americans pay into this system? 
...

If you want to do something about educational inequality, then the existing K12 system in the US would have to go. As it is, the system has more in common with feudalism than with meritocracy - poor kids are effectively in villeinage to a school district and go to schools that are often bad by Third World standards. Comparatively well-off folks in leafy suburbs have often excellent local schools, and of course the rich are spoiled for choice. But none of this has actually much to do with college - trying to solve these issues in college is like taking lime and honey remedies for Covid instead of getting vaccinated - it's not really a throat infection, so trying to disinfect your throat is ineffective.
Back to the other issues, my solution would be for the feds to severely crack down on what programs and institutions are eligible for using federal student loans on (a relevant metric would indeed be median income five years after leaving the institution divided by mean cost of attending - yes, this would penalize institutions from which people tend not to graduate). The money saved could then be put towards grants for institutions that would make the cut, which could be used for unglamorous (and thus ignored by private donors) stuff like building maintenance or wages - but would come with strings attached of constraints of how much institutions could charge for anything mandatory (including dorms for institutions that make them mandatory for freshers). Also, modern apprenticeships.
This isn't actually all that different from how it used to work in the US, except it would involve primarily involve federal money, whereas it used to involve mainly state money.
Ideally everyone would contribute towards the system, though in practice it would be the middle class that'd pay for it, because that's basically who pays taxes - the poor are in many cases net recipients of subsidies and the rich deduct private jets as business expenses from taxes, have people buried in golf courses to make them tax-exempt, etc.

[Wahoo Redux]

Fair enough.  It is a sane, reasonable plan, Stockmann, but I am not sure I see mayors, senators, and alumni going along with it. 

As I've posted before, if our very mediocre uni closes it will devastate a city already devastated.  Our city educates almost exclusively regional people, as with our last school, and the area is full of "[insert mascot here] Pride" bumper stickers and T-shirts.  Closing our school because of federal regulations would drive a number of people bonkers.  It would be interesting to see how all the Trumpees we've got hanging their bright red Trump flags off their porches and pickup trucks would react----a lot of these have attended our uni.  Hmmm, can't predict that one.

Our school is open enrollment and mediocre at best (despite the president's rah-rah "State of the University Address" the other day) and the graduation rate is getting slowly better but is still embarrassing. 

Nevertheless, our school serves an important purpose in our region on several fronts.  Most of our middle class students would undoubtedly go someplace else if we closed, but our poor students, of which there are a lot, would not; we are very affordable, and you can see it in our salaries, facilities, and graduation rates.  If our school closes, the new apartments next to campus will become blocks of derelict buildings among many derelict buildings already there----somebody will go bankrupt.  The few remaining restaurants are done, as are the gas stations.  So now we are closed we've got more urban blight and ecological damage----I suppose we could apply for more federal cleanup funds...and that's some irony as we try to save money. 

The median salaries of our graduates are not going to be comparatively high since most stay in the region.  Even if our alumni enter the professional world they are not going to be making what graduates from other colleges are making in other regions and cities.  NYU would bury us, for instance, and never mind the U of California schools.

So your plan, as good as it is, makes me wonder about its practicability.  We will have to hire a whole slew of new admincritters to keep track of alumni salaries (or is that overseen by a massive federal office in Washington D.C.?) and we will give them motivation to massage the numbers.  And I think we'd need to rely on self-reported incomes from graduates, which assumes they would take the time to fill out a survey.  Some would, some would not----how do you deal with that?

And how do we calculate salaries and include alumni who take on worthwhile employment that pays poorly (military, kindergarten teacher, Peace Corps, social work, law enforcement, etc.) or alumni who go to graduate school, or alumni who stay home to take care of children or elderly parents, or alumni who start a business that fails, or alumni who become sick or injured, or alumni who decide to work at 7/11 while they write their novel...or even just the alumni who fall off the face of the planet for personal reasons having nothing to do with education?  Certainly a school should not be penalized for these sorts of life decisions.  All the sudden we have binders full of governemnt regulations and exceptions and the forms that go along with them, each of which is probably different in each state.  Since this is the government, we DO need fair and accurate data.  We know the Harvard MBA is pulling down bank.  But for the rest of us, if the feds are going to deny our schools federal funds, the feds are going to have to prove their case. 

Maybe that massive office in Washington D.C. has the authority to collate lists of graduates with their I.R.S. records?  That is a lot of graduates and a lot of W-9s for a lot of years.  That's spendy and red-tapey.

Maybe we hire private consulting firms to do all this dirty work?  Yeah, that's got controversy and ballooning pricing written all over it.

Seems like we have a whole new set of expensive problems.

And no one here is going to argue that we need to fix K-12 funding.  All of us, except maybe you Ivy Leaguers, deal with the inequities of property tax and cultural background whenever we teach.  And we are going to need to fix that first before we begin tearing down colleges, otherwise, yeah, we are only going to be educating the middle and upper class kids.  Our city's K-12 is nationally recognized for its sheer shittyness.  We've just closed a portal to these kids when we knock down our uni.  Our community college system is not much better.

And, yeah, even if the middle class pays for all this, those Walmart courtesy clerks and green chain yankers are going to want to know why their kids can't go to college.

I like your idea, Stockmann.  There's just all this other stuff.

[Anon1787]

More evidence that the value of getting a college degree is declining.

"Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of 'matched jobs' that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. ...we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role."

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30397#fromrss

[Wahoo Redux]

This is the abstract.  Did you read the paper itself?  Just curious.

PEW Research Center blames COVID for graduates living at home.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-depression/

Don't know if they have the same metrics. 

[Anon1787]

This is the abstract.  Did you read the paper itself?  Just curious.

PEW Research Center blames COVID for graduates living at home.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-depression/

Don't know if they have the same metrics.

Quick skim. Their data is pre-Covid.

[apl68]

More evidence that the value of getting a college degree is declining.

"Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of 'matched jobs' that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. ...we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role."

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30397#fromrss

Which speaks to what I was trying to say earlier in this thread.  An awful lot of college students in recent years have either failed to graduate or have otherwise not gained economic benefits commensurate with all the money they put into college.  They've been giving college bad word of mouth to everybody who will listen.  People aren't turning their back on college because they've been brainwashed by anti-higher ed propaganda.  They're turning their back on college because they and their parents have heard people they know talk about what a disaster it was for them.  They don't think going to college will benefit them.

And a lot of them are probably right.  If the complaints we see in the threads on the "Teaching" forum are anything to go by, a frighteningly large and growing proportion of American youth are coming out of school with nothing like either the academic skills or life skills needed to succeed in college.  They're either going to flunk out, or be passed by virtue of the sort of declining standards that enabled them to earn a high school diploma in the first place.  If the latter, they will find themselves unable to successfully get and keep the sorts of jobs they thought that college would get them.