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A college degree is a lousy investment

Turns out the framers of the NC Constitution were Bernie Bros

Article IX
Sec. 9. Benefits of public institutions of higher education.
The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.


Doing this would take care of educating the poor, improve social mobility, and put downward pressure on private school tuition.
 
Higher education became less taxpayer funded and more subsidized by loan middlemen.
 
https://www.chronicle.com/article/H...71a5f&elqaid=21027&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9970

In its ongoing trial, Harvard surprises no one by disclosing that children of donors and low-income students both receive a boost in the admissions process.

And athletes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/

By the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s own estimate, 61 percent of student athletes last year were white. At elite colleges, that number is even higher: 65 percent in the Ivy League, not including international students, and 79 percent in the Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes elite liberal-arts colleges like Williams College and Amherst College. As Harvard heads to court to fend off allegations that it discriminates against Asian American applicants, the plaintiffs behind the case have released to the public reams and reams of data analyzing the school’s admissions process. They allege that one factor used in admissions, called “personal rating,” systematically disadvantages Asian American students. But tucked into the 168-page analysis of Harvard’s admissions data is a curious statistic about another nonacademic factor considered by the school: athletics.
All applicants to Harvard are ranked on a scale of one to six based on their academic qualifications, and athletes who scored a four were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent. Yet the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score was 0.076 percent—nearly 1,000 times lower. Similarly, 83 percent of athletes with a top academic score got an acceptance letter, compared to 16 percent of nonathletes. Legacy admissions policies get a lot of flak for privileging white applicants, but athletes have a much bigger effect on admissions, and make up a much bigger percentage of the class. And it’s not just Harvard—in 2002, James Schulman and former Princeton University President William Bowen looked at 30 selective colleges and found that athletes were given a 48 percent boost in admissions, compared to 25 percent for legacies and 18 percent for racial minorities.
Read: What the Harvard trial is really about

Put another way, college sports at elite schools are a quiet sort of affirmative action for affluent white kids, and play a big role in keeping these institutions so stubbornly white and affluent. What makes this all the more perplexing, says John Thelin, a historian of higher education at the University of Kentucky, is that “no other nation has the equivalent of American college sports.” It’s a particular quirk of the American higher-education system that ultimately has major ramifications for who gets in—and who doesn’t—to selective colleges.

When it comes to college athletics, football and basketball command the most public attention, but in the background is a phalanx of lower-profile sports favored by white kids, which often cost a small fortune for a student participating at a top level. Ivy League sports like sailing, golf, water polo, fencing, and lacrosse aren’t typically staples of urban high schools with big nonwhite populations; they have entrenched reputations as suburban, country-club sports. According to the NCAA, of the 232 Division I sailors last year, none were black. Eighty-five percent of college lacrosse players were white, as well as 90 percent of ice-hockey players.
 
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Not going to listen to those but that’s pretty much correct for elite institutions and most grad programs. You could make the case it applies to athletics in some respects as well.
 
What you are missing in the video is comparing students in PA who got accepted to Penn St and Penn. Does their choice have an affect on them later in life?
Malcolm's conclusion is "elite schools are selection effect institutions masquerading as treatment effect institutions."

So if colleges don't make you successful, then why should they be charging so much? Then why should their students go into debt?
 
Because society places value on where you went to college because it means you were considered part of an elite group at some point in life.
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/31/the...be-about-degrees-it-will-be-about-skills.html

This new data points to something much larger. Rapid technological change, combined with rising education costs, have made our traditional higher-education system an increasingly anachronistic and risky path. The cost of a college education is so high now that we have reached a tipping point at which the debt incurred often isn't outweighed by future earnings potential.

While my father had one job throughout his life, I've had several. And I tell my children not only can they expect to have many jobs throughout their working lives but multiple jobs at the same time.

It is therefore imperative that we encourage more options to thrive without our current overreliance on college degrees as proof of ability. We need new routes to success and hope.

this was embedded in above article
https://www.fastcompany.com/90247298/5-things-im-telling-my-kids-to-prepare-them-for-the-future
 
That Fast Company piece is good. I would add a big one. I don’t think there will be a traditional job market. People will create work for themselves. The big thing blocking this is health care. Once universal health care becomes a reality people will feel more free to work how they see fit rather than latch onto employers as a security blanket.

Increasing minimum wage will allow more people more time to get these nanodegrees and MOOC MAs and such. They’ll also have more time to work on their Etsy accounts or just drive Uber to make a few extra bucks.
 

Meh. If you can’t take the time to read and understand the requirements for a tax free gift of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you probably don’t deserve it.
 
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