It’s an opinion, and since this thread is full of them I’m struggling to understand the different standard for mine.
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Even discounted, average benefit of college degree exceeds average debt levels. Though which side of which average you are on is important. Value of college degree I think ultimately has decreased (multiple factors there too). But to the extent a group of people is deciding against college, I say maybe they are onto something should at least be a part of the analysis process.
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That may be why, at many colleges, the majors filled to capacity are likely to be those believed to have well paid job prospects afterward – many students and parents are thinking of how to pay off any student loan debt after graduation. Even liberal arts majors are often chosen for pre-professional reasons (e.g. economics, applied math, and statistics for finance aspirants).
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Since several posts have referenced the military, it should be noted that the number of young people joining the military is virtually negligible compared to the number of students enrolling in college, and in fact military recruitment has struggled in recent years.
The Defense Department estimates that just 2% out of 20.6 million 17- to 21-year-olds have the desired combination of strong academic credentials, adequate physical fitness and an interest in serving…
What’s more, recruits tend to be drawn from a shrinking segment of the population – from a small number of mostly southern states and families of veterans, a group whose share of the population is lower than at any time since World War II.
The Army hoped to bring in about 76,500 new soldiers this year. But with the fiscal year ending this month, it is still 6,500 troops short, even after spending an extra $200 million on bonuses and lowering standards to let in more troops with conduct or health issues…
The military’s promise of college tuition and other benefits has less of a draw, said Sgt. First Class Michael T. Peppers, the commander of a strip mall recruiting station next to a Subway and a Tasty Tacos in Urbandale, Iowa.
“We’re competing with other businesses offering the same things,” he said, noting that even McDonald’s has a program to help employees pay tuition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/army-recruiting-shortage.html
Military recruiting is approaching a crisis, with clear implications for U.S. national security. The unfitness and unwillingness of American youth to serve show us the inherent limits of our current military manning. America’s vaunted all-volunteer force (AVF) is increasingly unsustainable.
The root of the problem is the fundamental math of the all-volunteer force: the “AVF arithmetic.” More than 4 million Americans turn 18 every year, but only 29 percent of them can meet minimum enlistment standards, leaving 1.2 million qualified to serve. Of those, only 15 percent exhibit any interest in military service, leaving 180,000 qualified and willing. To meet its needs, the military must recruit upwards of 85 percent of this group every year.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/419641-the-armed-forces-arithmetic-isnt-adding-up
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Many do that. But far too many don’t. Sacrilegious to some people here but reality to most in the real world (outside this site).
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Posters here do skew toward much higher SES levels than typical in the US, so the students are more likely to be able to rely on family support for an extended job search, and are more likely to have family connections to give them advantages in job searches. Family money could also help them pay for professional school after their bachelor’s degrees. Hence there may not be as much of the immediate urgency to study something that will quickly get a job at graduation that will pay off the student loans.
That said, many students and parents have inaccurate ideas of what majors are associated with strong job markets.
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Though really, completion is more important for a financial benefit from college than major.
So if someone goes into, say, economics but drops out, they’re worse off than someone who goes into philosophy and graduates.
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Rather than lament the options available to the affluent, I think it makes more sense to focus on the best options for those who are not. Though just like the idea of college, college, college works on the individual level but fails on the societal level, just pick a good major also works on the individual level but not for college students as a whole.
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There are not a lot of Inter-racial marriage among my Facebook friends from college, but my friends may be “self selecting” since a large group of my friends attended HBCUs. There is definitely a portion of the Black women that I know who want a Black man or would chose to be alone, and some who prioritize their independence, career, and extended family more than any man.
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Another link from the NY Post. One snippet from this article states that the divorce rate is 1/3 higher in marriages where the Woman makes more money the Man. When women become the breadwinners in a majority of homes, will our families fall apart, because women are more educated and make more money? I don’t understand this phenomenon, because my wife’s financial success helps our family.
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Important: If you follow the links near the end of the column (and this is an opinion column, not a news article) that mention divorce rates, neither of them support his claim that women being more educated leads to more divorce. One of the links is a news story that simply reports that divorce rates have gone up during the pandemic, and the other is a scholarly article on factors influencing divorce related to income and job status that controls for education levels of both spouses, but that does not analyze differential education levels and so says nothing about the column’s claim.
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@ChangeTheGame I seem to remember reading years ago that divorce rates rose among couples where women have the higher income because women were more able to seek the divorce as they weren’t financially dependent. Essentially taking away some of the financial risk in divorce for those women–they felt less “trapped”.
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I’m with you, @ChangeTheGame. My wife made less than I did when we got together, but she pursued an MBA part-time while working and rose quickly after that. Her income crossed past mine shortly after we married, about two decades ago, and now she pings back and forth between the corporate world (in which she makes about three to five times what I do) and the nonprofit world (where she is now, making twice what I do). She’ll go back to for-profit at some point, but even now we’ll be able to comfortably put both kids through college with no loans. It would never occur to me to resent her success in any way.
More on-topic, fortunately it would also never occur to our son not to go to college. He’s proud of our success and knows higher education is the key to doing the same – doubly so for a Black family, as ours also is. I had the example of my parents, both college-educated and successful until some midlife reversals. And as in my marriage, my mother was the one with a master’s degree. My wife, who’s half-Black but grew up in an all-White family, was more of a pioneer – she and one of her many cousins were the first in their large extended family to go to college. At any rate, I feel for those young men who are struggling, and their families. I know we’re very lucky.
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