NYTimes Magazine: Americans Losing Faith in College

[Wahoo Redux]

This seems like old news, but the article has details and some new commentary.

New York Times Magazine: Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?

Lower Deck:

For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.

These are startling data, and they present a kind of paradox. Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren't accumulating any more wealth. How can that be?

Lowell Ricketts told me he had a pretty good idea of the cause, even though the group's data couldn't be conclusive on this point. The likely culprit, he said, was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it. Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business. And even if you (or your parents) were able to pay your tuition without loans, the savings you used are gone when you graduate, and thus are no longer available to serve as a down payment on a starter home or the beginning of a nest egg for retirement.

A few decades ago, tuition costs were manageable for many Americans. But since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation.

[larix]

Paywalled so I admit to not having read it but I hope that there was also some discussion about the decline in state funding that has contributed to the rising cost of tuition.

I am curious though how the US compares to other countries where tuition hasn't increased as dramatically?

[Langue_doc]

larix, see if this link works.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html?unlocked_article_code=Xlx_vTsdUS5E5APXerYU9IqT7XQTxRuL73HzId_O57TIzx1j6Cweamgv142BjELuYtETmsPtzrrusfaysFJEBttMhFZTH7VbgA6ZUXnQXkCs4KElYOpK7SI-z8T1Xx19mN4lixHiN7HqJisgr_n1HgTLeTKh61SM_wS-EHZajOQ2ieIINxEcOdZj453y_NhIxEakeyJfI55y_Cd10d7dl8eSShWkr7hKdv0WZjL2TwKkAhnG29w4g-TSX9j51CnAPuoMoV74Q2eDgQhuHyIwP9PUditVXFC4jpUSwft2woykQ5kTe4TUa5_yNY9K8d2uvV9ngbDxE4-ctSw5eyU&smid=url-share

[marshwiggle]

larix, see if this link works.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html?unlocked_article_code=Xlx_vTsdUS5E5APXerYU9IqT7XQTxRuL73HzId_O57TIzx1j6Cweamgv142BjELuYtETmsPtzrrusfaysFJEBttMhFZTH7VbgA6ZUXnQXkCs4KElYOpK7SI-z8T1Xx19mN4lixHiN7HqJisgr_n1HgTLeTKh61SM_wS-EHZajOQ2ieIINxEcOdZj453y_NhIxEakeyJfI55y_Cd10d7dl8eSShWkr7hKdv0WZjL2TwKkAhnG29w4g-TSX9j51CnAPuoMoV74Q2eDgQhuHyIwP9PUditVXFC4jpUSwft2woykQ5kTe4TUa5_yNY9K8d2uvV9ngbDxE4-ctSw5eyU&smid=url-share

Some interesting points from the article:

Then the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.
The data for Black families showed the same pattern, but with an even more pronounced downturn. As with the white graduates, older Black college grads were enjoying sizable wealth advantages over their less-educated peers, with generally two or three times the assets of comparable Black high school grads. But Black college graduates born after 1980 were experiencing almost no wealth premium at all. In fact, the researchers found that the wealth premium for Black grads disappeared even earlier than it did for the white graduates. Black college graduates born in the 1970s weren't receiving any substantial wealth benefit, either, only those born in the 1960s and earlier. Latino families followed a similar pattern. If they were headed by someone born after 1980, they had accumulated no significant additional resources beyond those of a comparable family headed by a high school graduate.

When did affirmative action start? If the admission requirements for non-white students were going down along with the cost of education going up, this would explain the greater decline, (or at least some of it), in wealth for non-white students.

When the researchers looked at young Americans who had gone on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was even more dire. "Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is ... indistinguishable from zero," the authors concluded. "Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment."

It would be interesting to see an analysis of the proportion of post-graduate education that has been self-funded has changed over time. I certainly wouldn't have gone to graduate school if I hadn't gotten a scholarship.

If a higher proportion are self-funded now, then that would undermine the wealth benefit.

A few years ago, Webber set out to try to make sense of that variability. For whom does college pay off, and for whom does it not? He analyzed the data by college major, by academic ability and by tuition costs, and was able to show in more detail exactly who was winning at the higher education casino and who was losing.

Start here: If your tuition is free and you can be absolutely certain that you're going to graduate within six years, then you enter college with a 96 percent chance that your gamble is going to pay off, meaning that your lifetime earnings will be greater than those of a typical high school graduate.

The problem, though, is that many students who start college don't graduate — about 40 percent of them, by one estimate.

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Webber next considered the impact of a student's major. If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you're paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you're in college. But if you're majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip. In fact, if your degree is in the arts or humanities, you're likely to lose the bet even if your annual college expenses are just $25,000.
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Last month, Webber and a colleague published some new research that identified the people who are making out the worst at the casino: students who borrow money to attend college but don't graduate.

There's a blinding flash of the obvious. (But it needed to be proven by evidence.)

On another note:

The Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A., which regularly surveys students, found last year that three times as many American college freshmen identified as liberal or far left as said they were conservative or far right. Among college faculty, the ratio is even more pronounced, and it has been growing more unbalanced over time, shifting from a 2-to-1 left-right ratio in the mid-1990s to a roughly 5-to-1 ratio in the early 2010s. Then there are the administrators. A separate poll from 2018 found that among student-facing university administrators, 12 times as many defined themselves as liberal as defined themselves as conservative.

No big surprise, but again it's worth having hard data. Among other things, that last fact about "student-facing university administrators" is potentially going to having an effect on all kinds of students from conservative religious backgrounds. As many immigrants come from more conservative religious backgrounds, this will affect them disproportionately.

This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor's degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.

Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that this political realignment has contributed to the growing public-opinion divide on higher ed. As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Hess says, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome.

Wow! I was not aware of that shift happening so fast.

[ciao_yall]

This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor's degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.

Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that this political realignment has contributed to the growing public-opinion divide on higher ed. As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Hess says, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome.

Wow! I was not aware of that shift happening so fast.

Or, is it that R's have gone away from the mainstream of educated and civil society? So they support voodoo economics, believe in oppressing the rights of women and people of color, and deny environmental science?

[marshwiggle]

This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor's degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.

Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that this political realignment has contributed to the growing public-opinion divide on higher ed. As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Hess says, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome.

Wow! I was not aware of that shift happening so fast.

Or, is it that R's have gone away from the mainstream of educated and civil society? So they support voodoo economics, believe in oppressing the rights of women and people of color, and deny environmental science?

In 4 years?

[ciao_yall]

This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate. In 2012, a majority of voters with a bachelor's degree (and no further credential) chose Mitt Romney for president over Barack Obama; in fact, B.A. holders were the only educational cohort Romney won. Obama made up for his losses among college grads by winning a majority of voters with only a high school diploma. Four years later, the education skew flipped: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among noncollege graduates, but he won only 36 percent of voters with college or graduate degrees.

Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that this political realignment has contributed to the growing public-opinion divide on higher ed. As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students, Hess says, Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome.

Wow! I was not aware of that shift happening so fast.

Or, is it that R's have gone away from the mainstream of educated and civil society? So they support voodoo economics, believe in oppressing the rights of women and people of color, and deny environmental science?

In 4 years?

More like 50, starting with Nixon's Southern Strategy.

[Wahoo Redux]

I think this is all a massive blowback from the counter culture of the '60s through the '80s.  At least the conservatives from the Eisenhower and Nixon eras who were the adults when I was a kid never got past the outrage of the hippies, Rock'n'Roll, ecology, and the anti-war movement.  Think of the older Republican voters right now.

Then when scientists agreed on global warming it turned out that the "hippy-dippies" (as my dad called them) might have been right about some things.  I think this made the old guard even angrier. 

Trump is the culmination of years of frustration over gains made by the LGBTQ movement, the conception of minorities getting special treatment, the inconvenient truths of ecology, and the attacks (some warranted, some misplaced) on the patriarchy.

[Hibush]

I think this is all a massive blowback from the counter culture of the '60s through the '80s.  At least the conservatives from the Eisenhower and Nixon eras who were the adults when I was a kid never got past the outrage of the hippies, Rock'n'Roll, ecology, and the anti-war movement. 

The hippies who were 22 in the Summer of Love, or 29 when the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed, are now in their late 70s and early 80s. So their elders are mostly gone.

I think the anger is real, but the old people who are angry at the hippies are younger than the ex-hippies. There has been a movement to transfer that anger to a new generation.

[kaysixteen]

This is certainly all true, and indeed it has happened with astonishing speed-- so what all can we do about it, and how do we get the message out to these folks that they are shooting themselves in the foot by hating *all* that college can offer?   And I do mean *all*, not just $$?

[larix]

larix, see if this link works.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html?unlocked_article_code=Xlx_vTsdUS5E5APXerYU9IqT7XQTxRuL73HzId_O57TIzx1j6Cweamgv142BjELuYtETmsPtzrrusfaysFJEBttMhFZTH7VbgA6ZUXnQXkCs4KElYOpK7SI-z8T1Xx19mN4lixHiN7HqJisgr_n1HgTLeTKh61SM_wS-EHZajOQ2ieIINxEcOdZj453y_NhIxEakeyJfI55y_Cd10d7dl8eSShWkr7hKdv0WZjL2TwKkAhnG29w4g-TSX9j51CnAPuoMoV74Q2eDgQhuHyIwP9PUditVXFC4jpUSwft2woykQ5kTe4TUa5_yNY9K8d2uvV9ngbDxE4-ctSw5eyU&smid=url-share

Thanks, that worked great. I see they did get into the decline of state funding but only mentioned the fact that tuition hasn't increased as dramatically outside the US.

I still would love to see a comparison with say Canada, culturally more similar to the US than Europe or Japan, where tuition hasn't increased as dramatically and whether the same value proposition arguments about College hold true?

[Wahoo Redux]

I think the anger is real, but the old people who are angry at the hippies are younger than the ex-hippies. There has been a movement to transfer that anger to a new generation.

My 15-year-old nephew has some pretty funny beliefs about "the hippies" that he has gotten from various media.  He hates them even though he is pre-political at this point in his life.

I think the bigger point is that this rage chasm opened up and never closed.  In the meantime, a great many of the cultural conflicts from that time period----gay rights, porn, rock music, premarital sex, dress codes, obscenities, the role of the church, feminism, the view of government and the police, even business practices----are increasingly liberal.  I believe conservative frustration is very, very deep.  We see this in this fora sometimes.

[marshwiggle]

larix, see if this link works.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html?unlocked_article_code=Xlx_vTsdUS5E5APXerYU9IqT7XQTxRuL73HzId_O57TIzx1j6Cweamgv142BjELuYtETmsPtzrrusfaysFJEBttMhFZTH7VbgA6ZUXnQXkCs4KElYOpK7SI-z8T1Xx19mN4lixHiN7HqJisgr_n1HgTLeTKh61SM_wS-EHZajOQ2ieIINxEcOdZj453y_NhIxEakeyJfI55y_Cd10d7dl8eSShWkr7hKdv0WZjL2TwKkAhnG29w4g-TSX9j51CnAPuoMoV74Q2eDgQhuHyIwP9PUditVXFC4jpUSwft2woykQ5kTe4TUa5_yNY9K8d2uvV9ngbDxE4-ctSw5eyU&smid=url-share

Thanks, that worked great. I see they did get into the decline of state funding but only mentioned the fact that tuition hasn't increased as dramatically outside the US.

I still would love to see a comparison with say Canada, culturally more similar to the US than Europe or Japan, where tuition hasn't increased as dramatically and whether the same value proposition arguments about College hold true?

One difference is that, in Canada, "going to university" doesn't mean the same as "going to college" in the US. People apply to specific programs, and are accepted (or not) into those programs. So there's not the same vague idea of "The Experience(TM)" as an end in itself. Students go specifically to study what they have decided on.

A very big cultural difference.

[Ruralguy]

I don't think you can just take the one "college educated/not college educated" shift from the Obama years to the Trump years, with no further demographic analysis, and conclude that what we see now was "sudden." I suspect that those groups were *not* all the same people, same racial grouping, gender, etc.

Populism and tribalism in politics has especially been growing since 1992 or so, accentuated by the party in the White House, the Perot movement and then the "Contract with America" era. I think the late 90's White House scandal/impeachment made things worse, especially considering what it all centered on, and then the very close election in 2000 again made things worse. And though Romney and Mc Cain candidacies may have looked like a moderation, and it probably was, they both lost, and so resentment towards old school Republicans rapidly grew and thus Trump (and others with similar inclinations). Due to some of the extreme views of the maga-ites and some of Trumps own behavior, I think a visceral hatred of the "other side" has grown (and its mutual). Culture war stuff that's been  around even longer than the early 90's has made things even worse.

[marshwiggle]

I don't think you can just take the one "college educated/not college educated" shift from the Obama years to the Trump years, with no further demographic analysis, and conclude that what we see now was "sudden." I suspect that those groups were *not* all the same people, same racial grouping, gender, etc.

True, but the segment of voters who actually voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 did not likely vote for Trump because of racism; pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.