Confidence in college dropped the most in adults 18 to 29 years old. Only 41 percent said it’s very important, compared to slight majorities in older age groups.
That is down from 74 percent in that age bracket in 2013. There appears to be some combination of alternatives to college now seeming plausible and recent college experience seeming unimpressive.
Note that the effect of this will really be felt in about 15 or 20 years, when these young people have children who are graduating from high school. At that point, colleges had better hope that attitudes turn around.
When newspapers experience a similar generational loss of confidence, the consequences were predictable, and the predictions proved true.
I have seen young people go through college, do well, and end up in highly paid jobs. All well and good. But the job often involves answering phone calls and emails and passing information on to people in their network, often by a different medium as to the one they received it. Admittedly it required knowledge of the product they were supporting, but academic expertise in a science subject? I couldn’t see it. A variation is flying around the world doing the same sort of thing visiting branch offices.
Doing well at college obviously indicates ability and endurance, but does the actual subject matter? It may as well be steam roller maintenance!
Of course this sort of employment is at risk of being supplanted by AI, and climate change considerations put unnecessary flying around branch offices as being antisocial.
Many, or most, colleges seem to be anti-American indoctrination centers trying to destroy Christian Capitalist civilization because of misguided social justice issues. I hope, but doubt, that Reps in Congress would end Fed/ gov’t college loans except for STEM subjects, and push prior loan responsibility back towards specific colleges AND towards all rich colleges (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc)
The Federal gov’t should stop hiring college graduates in the lower 60% of its job classifications — and exclude college graduates who apply for those jobs, instead favoring non-college applicants.
Plus make it easier to fire gov’t employees.
Hah!
Stated vs revealed preferences under the expanding regime of ‘problematic’ claims.
Even if enrollments tracked confidence, the cause would be ‘over-determined’ to say the least. But they don’t, enrollment seems steady at the new, post-financial crisis equilibrium, and (depending a bit on perspective and interpretation) I’d say that growth in alternatives has not filled the gap. That’s not like the rapid collapse in revenues for paper newspapers, or from stamps for personal snail mail, as people switched to substitutes.
Instead, my impression is that this actually tracks a broader cultural political shift, affecting all subgroups to some extent, that is part of the fallout of “The Great Awokening” which really got into gear during that timeframe (2013-19). Consider whether this is a sudden global shift in attitudes or specific to the US during this particular period.
That is, because the question is phrased not as specifically limited to forward-looking empirical assessment (“leads to higher pay” / “easier to find job”) but as a subjective judgment of “importance” which can scoop in people of all cohorts for evaluation, and it unavoidably implicates matters of value, personal worth, and social status, and people in general have recently and quickly become much more reluctant and hesitant to say things which could be interpreted to mean that the people who didn’t attend college are somehow less worthy than the ones who did.
Consider the frequent use of the word ‘important’ in personnel selection. If you are hiring and looking at resumes with a colleague, you may ask “Is it important that they have no criminal record?” If talking about matchmaking, a woman might ask her girlfriend, “How important is it that he be taller than you?”
So there is a potentially judgy aspect to it, and concern that it could be unfavorably interpreted as having a snobbish, elitist, ‘privileged’ tone (the kind of thing which, if one is trying to avoid it at all costs, ends up in the calling of everyone as citoyen or comrade.)
To say something is generically important without those clarifications above is to unavoidably imply that it is directly or indirectly reflective of a fundamental personal characteristic that makes someone higher or lower.
And when people are more likely to make uncharitable interpretations, they are also more likely to be scared of saying things prone to uncharitable interpretation (even just to feel like a good, enlightened, right-thinking person), and so suddenly don’t want to explicitly state those preferences and beliefs, even as their behavior reveals little change in them.
Perhaps the negative attention received by the SJW nonsense on campus plays a role, but I suspect that it comes down to simple economic decision making. A lot of people are realizing, perhaps not entirely consciously, that the time/expense/effort of college is not worth it in the end. Seeing people with degrees working in retail jobs probably isn’t a great motivator.
Even with a STEM degree that tends to pay off, the path is terribly inefficient. Take out all of the courses with the wildly dubious claims that they make you a better person or teach you how to think, the amount of time spent on campus could be cut at least in half.
For non-STEM degrees, a person really needs to think about what he is getting in to if he doesn’t have time to waste and his parents don’t have money to burn.
Engineering isn’t there yet, but many people in the IT field are able to bypass the college gatekeepers and create successful careers. Disruption is long overdue in the entire education field.
Donald Knuth in a famous computer science paper from 1974 wrote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” which reveals an important truth while also showing that metaphors play an important role in analytical thinking (see yesterday’s discussion on Analytical Philosophy).
The common refrain programmers use in the spirit of Knuth is “first make it right then make it fast”. The recognition that the path to a STEM degree is inefficient does not make one less likely to deploy an evil premature optimization.
My general impression about the efficacy of education, starting with debates about MOOCs years ago, is that we don’t even have the language nailed down to begin a detailed analysis of the education system, never mind designing optimizations that pass the Null Hypothesis.
I think the most successful education systems globally have generally got it right since WWII. The question is whether we are in a place where we can now make it fast(er) or better.
Note that the effect of this will really be felt in about 15 or 20 years
Several things:
1) I do tend to agree the enrollment at college will decline the next 15 years due to decreases foreign students and birth rates. Also we probably don’t see 8% unemployment next recession.
2) Change that to 25 – 30 years not 15 – 20. Young people are kids later in life.
3) Of course it will depend on a lot their economic fortunes of this generation. If you think the non-college graduates are going to do well, then college choice will look worse. Otherwise, it will not diminish to degree conservatives hope.
Show me evidence non-college graduates long term will rise. Given our sub 4% unemployment and lots of anti-college opinions, why isn’t vocational education not growing a whole lot?
4) When thinking about the US future economy, I tend to think Japan is generation ahead of us. Are the number of college graduates declining there?
“Confidence has dropped….”
And not without good reason. Adjusting for newly available data on a variety of factors reduces the alleged college income premium significantly: https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college-worth-it/emmons_kent_ricketts_college_still_worth_it.pdf?la=en
And I think most people are rightly disgusted with the proliferation of vanity degree programs (MFAs, grievance studies degrees, etc) at state universities and also the proliferation of state imposed occupational licensing regulations that include degree requirements (social work, teaching, accounting etc) that many people could perform as through self-instruction or on-the-job training as well as or better than degreed individuals.
Kling points to the the print newspaper industry, which saw ominous signs of doom and being replaced by competition, and the ominous predictions eventually came true. To most consumers, this wasn’t ominous or doom and gloom, it was a giant improvement.
Hopefully, with higher ed, it will be a similar story: There will be big paradigm shifts that will benefit the masses. We want a broad skilled labor force that delivers more value, innovation, efficiency to the world. We want people to have better access to quality education they want to further their careers or pursue personal interests.
And sure, some people who benefit from the status quo, might experience disruption as a negative and as “ominous”, but with a good paradigm shift, the masses of people on Earth should experience an improvement.
It is plausible but my intuition is that the newspaper disruption is nothing like the issues facing education. Newspapers fell victim to a perfect storm made of three mega-waves: web, mobile, and cloud. This tsunami could succinctly be described as “digital products and distribution displacing their physical alternatives”; the only serious question was the timing, pace, and scope of the oncoming displacement.
There is no equivalent “wave” behind your education disruption story other than a general unease that things are getting worse. I think education has some characteristics that make it difficult to disrupt; especially the noisiness and generation-length lag time of the feedback signals.
Sure, there are more differences than similarities between the newspaper industry and higher ed.
To be fair, I have no idea when or how major higher ed reforms will come, and the current system is good at protecting itself, it’s also entrenched in government and is much less vulnerable to free market forces. But I’m convinced that they will come and that there are large gains to society to be had. The inefficiencies with the current system are just too big and fueling a growing appetite for reform.
Is there “a growing appetite for reform” or just a growing appetite for “it shouldn’t cost so much”–which is actually “it shouldn’t cost so much for me”, meaning someone else should pay?
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren champion higher ed reforms that I’m not sympathetic to. On the more reasonable side, I suspect there has already been broad agreement with the arguments against the higher ed status quo presented by Roger Scruton, Peter Thiel, SlateStarCodex, and Bryan Caplan. But they don’t know what specifically to do about it. Bryan Caplan’s sole proposal of simply stopping higher ed subsidies is a political loser.
One factor that will likely lead to major structural change is tech and the tech elite that is growing in influence and capability.
And, of course, “it shouldn’t cost so much for me” usually leads to giving more government money to the existing colleges and universities, further entrenching them.
One thing people miss is that the top 100 or so schools are now an international luxury good. And with education, status, and Western contacts bundled into the top unis (as well as the important aspect of learning to speak English well and socialize with the elite) demand for good universities in N America and the UK will grow or at worst stay steady. Low end universities are the ones most likely to be disrupted. Meaning that middle level schools will signal with useless stuff to claim to be in the top group.
That is an excellent point. I’d add that post-secondary education in the United States is also an outlier in the anglosphere in terms of the cost variation between institutions and the fuzziness of lumping everything under the term “college”. The rest of the anglosphere makes a much clearer distinction between vocational/technical colleges and universities. Much of the low-hanging fruit in the U.S. involves innovation in vocational/technical colleges and its hard to discuss these innovations if Stanford and M.I.T. keep creeping into the conversation. We understand that STEM tracks are important but we forget the important difference between college level and university level STEM tracks. Adding to the confusion is that the humanities and social science tracks have historically occupied high-end universities.
It’s obvious… No one has monopoly on knowledge or information. The linear teaching methods (from one professor to many students) are pretty similar to what newspapers or TV channels used to be. Comically inferior to distributed, emergent networks.
Centralized governments are next. But because they like using violence to retain “customers” the path may not be gradual or smooth.
The universities have a monopoly on credentialing and ranking people at learning; they definitely don’t have a monopoly on the information itself. Most academic information is captured in textbooks that are sold on Amazon for modest prices (relative to tuition, $100-$200 on a textbook is nothing) and many textbooks are available as free downloads.
There is also a big social component of universities. I’ve heard this isn’t the case in other nations, but in the US, Universities are the primary place to form peer groups.
It would be easy for a private organization to pay coaches and teach traditional academics and measure achievement, but the big barrier is that there is no appetite for that detached from traditional credentials and the socialization of traditional universities.
when these young people have children who are graduating from high school
—
High school changes right along.
Most high school students will already be taking some outside skills classes so the graduating points are no longer aligned.
This from a 2016 paper seems to be playing out
” Occupational employment shifts have held down the college-only premium somewhat since the year 2000, suggesting that college-educated workers are increasingly sliding down into routine jobs. This is consistent with polarization or skill downgrading. More recently, since 2010, the wage gap between graduate degree holders and the college-only group within the same broad occupations has declined somewhat, suggesting that graduate training may be providing less of a competitive edge than it has in the past. This suggests that skill downgrading may be playing an increasingly important role at the top of the skill distribution. Overall, the results suggest rising competition between education groups for increasingly scarce well-paid jobs.”
“Although higher education may be financially advantageous on average, the flattening of returns as costs have continued to rise suggests that college may be an unfavorable financial investment for rising numbers of individuals. In these circumstance, individual variation in returns looms as an increasingly important issue for future research.”
-Recent Flattening in the Higher Education Wage Premium: Polarization, Skill Downgrading, or Both?, Robert G. Valletta, NBER Working Paper No. 22935, Issued in December 2016
Individual variation is coming to dominate making college an increasingly risky investment, even as in aggregate it pays off well for some. The confidence in college was for when it was more broadly good even with little detailed investment by the student.
This would be a good bet for Bryan Caplan, Mr. Case Against Education himself. Will undergrad enrollments (perhaps ‘total revenues’ in the alternative) decrease by 10% in 5 years, which is the kind of dent a genuine collapse in perceptions of ‘importance’ for young people (such as those reported in the survey) should make.
I’d bet no.
I don’t think Bryan Caplan would take that bet, and I don’t think his conclusions would encourage him to. People have to go to college for the signaling value, whether they like it or not. Signaling isn’t necessarily becoming less important. In fact the negative perception of college may be due to it becoming more of an annoying requirement everyone has to go through. The more people go to college, the worse it looks to be one of the few who doesn’t go, and the more pressure there is on even lower quality students to try go to college. They don’t like it because it’s difficult for them, while the smarter kids don’t like it either because the student population becomes more mediocre, and everything more geared toward the larger, less selective group. As college becomes more necessary, everyone becomes less pleased with it. So I don’t think it’s even a case of revealed preferences vs. stated preferences. It’s becoming less and less of a choice and more of an obligation. And of course, the more of an obligation it becomes, the less colleges have to give a damn about how happy students are with the product.
Bryan Caplan wrote on September 12, 2018:
Samuel Knoche, a student at Fordham University, has taken me up on an old bet:
I bet at even odds that 10 years from now, the fraction of American 18-24 year-olds enrolled in traditional four-year colleges will be no more than 10% (not 10 percentage-points!) lower than it is today.
That, and a similar bet with slightly updated terms, seem to be the last bets he made. They are number 27 and 28 on his bet wiki.
Thanks!
There could be a divergence between say top 100 schools and the rest. I could see a collapse of overpriced liberal arts schools with low day score averages.
I think a lot of people who would have gone to a private college fifty years ago are now going to state schools, whose list prices are substantially lower. The private colleges are fighting that by increasing “aid” but there is a limit to how far they can go. Eventually, the least prestigious wind up bankrupt and closing. (Though so far, not anywhere near Schelling tennis club numbers.)
However, that doesn’t much affect the total number of students, just where they are going.
With the recent death of Sir Roger Scruton, I have been pondering the significance of his life and career. The second and third-hand stories are clear, that his book _Thinkers of the New Left_ helped to ruin his career in academia. The fact that the book came out during Thatcher’s ascendancy seems to have been a salient bit of bad luck for his academic career.
There is a problem with much of the theory taught in the social sciences outside of economics and fields such as demography, psychology, computationally intense information fields, etc. Periodically students are led toward theories that are not useful because they either (1) have no predictive power, or (2) they are based on a flawed view of human nature and history, or (3) both 1 and 2. Or to put it more mildly, many theories are largely speculative and not very analytically useful.
It would be interesting to see certain lectures begin with a caveat or proviso: “I get paid for teaching this, but it might not actually be useful outside of making a career in academia. That, and understanding the spoken and written output of people who have learned to communicate in a lingo that we are introducing in this part of the course.”
What’s going on?
1. Thomas Sowell’s point is useful: “An intellectual is someone whose work begins and ends with ideas.” Ideas are used to produce other ideas–the outcomes are not the point. Thus people behind the Iron Curtain were not great fans of Marxoid analysis, but intellectuals in the West have often been drawn to it.
2. It is easy to confuse the obscure with the useful. Studying math in STEM seems to be useful, thus studying arcane philosophers is theorized to the be the equivalent heavy lifting in the social sciences and humanities. “They study differential equations, but here we are puzzling over Foucault.”
Sokal wrote of this issue after his “Sokal Hoax” of twenty years ago. I believe he noted that “Not everything that is obscure is profound.”
3. The USA, I will propose, is suffering from an overproduction of intellectuals or intellectuals manques with philosophical and literary interests. Robert Conquest noted that Latin American long had the problem–we seem to have caught up here.
To a considerable extent, the natural habitat of such individuals has turned out to be academia–also journalism.
= – = – = = – = – =
Just thinking off the top of my head. Thanks for listening.
Regarding issues of higher education related to cost and effectiveness, Richard Vedder’s _Going broke by degree_ is still worth reading. He keeps up a fairly steady of drumbeat of columns at places like Forbes and Minding the Campus, but _Going broke by degree_ has more analytical power, rather than just a litany of complaints and observations.
https://www.aei.org/press/going-broke-by-degree-why-college-costs-too-much/