From a poll of recent college grads:
Nearly one in five (17%) college grads polled still don’t know how to cook or do their own laundry. Twenty-six percent are also feeling lost when it comes to basic apartment maintenance too – like unclogging a toilet or resetting a Wi-Fi router.
Before you allow your children to go to college, make them take at least a year to live in the real world first.
I’m 49 years old and still don’t know how to cook (which is not to say that I have never cooked meals in my life). In all seriousness, I’m not sure that delaying college for a year would actually improve that statistic and, even if it did, that learning those life skills at 18 and attending college from 19-23 is really so much better than attending college from 18-22 and learning those life skills at 23.
Even if the only thing college did was certify students’ intelligence (or even just book smarts), persistence, conformity, etc. — i.e., even if Bryan Caplan’s signaling model explained 100% of the college education premium — that wouldn’t be sufficient reason to not send one’s own kids to college because the college education premium would still exist. It might be an argument against subsidizing college as a matter of public policy, but that’s different from a recommendation for what individuals should do.
Arnold, Are you recommending the 18 year-old go out into the world and try to making his/own living on $10 per hour, maybe 30 hours per week? Because that is what is on offer. It’s not like when you and I were 18. When I was 19 in 1975, I worked as a hospital orderly and made $2.76 per hour, 40 hours per week. With that I could afford my $150 per month studio apartment in the San Fernando Valley. I think that same apartment is now $2000 per month.
Kids should be doing those things before they are finished with middle school. I know that I was doing my own laundry, helping to prepare meals, and occasionally cooking a meal on my own before entering high school.
I live near a large public university, which years ago I attended as a commuting student. Back then there was a requirement for freshmen to live in the dorms, thereafter they could enrich the local real estate developers who provided off-campus apartments, most of which were rather plain and basic.
Now the freshman requirement has been relaxed, local property owners grown wealthier have upgraded many old apartments at least somewhat. Zoning has been changed and out of town developers are erecting many multistory towers of elaborate high density student housing with many amenities. Other developments include sprawling student housing complexes in outlying areas with regular bus service and large parking lots for student cars.
Where once heading off to college meant spartan quarters and a focus on classes and learning, including how to conduct daily life in an unfamiliar environment, today it is rather luxurious and without challenge to the life skills of the students. Universities recognize catering to and coddling their student population is profitable, as do the real estate professionals who attach themselves to this market.
As Lizard Man noted, these life skills are not cultivated at earlier stages, indicating that the universities are not the sole contributors to these unfortunate outcomes.
“Where once heading off to college meant spartan quarters and a focus on classes and learning”
‘Once’ was a long damn time ago — 1950s maybe (but maybe not even then). Trying to focus on studying while living in a dorm (living in close quarters with nearly non-stop socializing) has been a challenge for generations. And it’s even worse in Greek houses. Apartments are really the only chance for students to have a quiet room of their own.
I’m not all anti-dorm — they’re a great place to have fun and meet people likely to become lifelong friends, but they’re really not ideal for studying. OTOH, if college is about signaling, then a student’s ability to succeed despite living with the constant noise, distractions, and temptations for goofing off of a dorm is a strong signal indeed.
My probably poorly stated point is more to the change in student expectations. Dorms were never easy to deal with, but the change in environment was a challenge for the student to either adapt and succeed or flounder while waiting for an apartment.
Those apartments were through the 1990’s rather basic, the newer ones are full of amenities hardly dreamed of for an earlier student population. Instead of being cash-conscious and learning to adapt with multiple students residing together in crappy apartments, the newer classes hit DoorDash and Uber Eats for meals rather than learning how to cook to a budget. Students and their families fund ever more elaborate housing while avoiding the growing up chores.
Slocum — you make fair points about dormitories, but it’s definitely true that student living was much more spartan in the past. Also true of the campus facilities. A few years ago I took a campus tour of the local big state university (a tour for high-school students thinking of going there). Things have really changed a lot since I was a student there back in the 70s. Everything looked really nice, whereas when I was a student a lot of the classroom buildings were pretty run down. Also, some of the classroom buildings have nice coffee shops within them now. Nothing like that back when I was a student.
“…but it’s definitely true that student living was much more spartan in the past…Things have really changed a lot since I was a student there back in the 70s.”
But everybody’s standard of living was much more spartan in the 1970s. We’re talking almost 50 years ago. Imagine what a person of your age back then would have said about the differences in campus life between the 1970s and the 1920s.
I just looked up tuition at Caltech, an absolutely worthy institution.
$56k a year.
$224k for a BA.
What has happened? And Caltech is hardly the most expensive.
Something has gone bananas in higher ed.
Not only is some sort of reformation is needed in terms of politics, but also pricing.
I don’t know, CalTech is one of the few institutions where that kind of tuition might be worth it. Where else do undergraduate students routinely work on research projects with Nobel laureates? Were my children to get accepted there, it is one of the few universities where I would consider taking out loans to help them attend, as opposed to telling them they should just go to an in-state school.
That’s list price. Most undergraduates don’t pay list price. I don’t know how accurate this is, but from a search:
These are all things that either can and should be learned before college or during (you can get an apartment off campus usually your second year). If you’re going into STEM fields I think it’s best to keep your math education continuous. Maybe I’m biased against gap years, but among people I knew who took them, they mostly just frittered away the time and I don’t think ended up better for it.
I’m wary about college but not because they don’t teach cooking or laundry. If my kid can’t do that by age 15 it’s on me.
I just wonder what the baseline of non-college educated children would be…
This added to host of other things has me wonder about whether 2 year post HS military stint would be beneficial to today’s youth who have been coddled more than any other i can think of. Yes, trade-offs involved, but that always the case.
After a 2-year post High School military stint, they would at the very least know how to make a bed.
Most young adults will figure out how to do laundry and feed themselves and deal with household issues such as plumbing + wifi. These are not good reasons to send children to college or not.
College is a kind of insurance policy against disaster for 18-24 year old. College needs a tech revolution. But until then I want my kids to have the insurance policy against disaster.
“A college degree once led to higher wealth. Debt has eroded that advantage. Among Americans born in the 1980s–the millennial generation–college graduates are only modestly wealthier than those who never went to college. While they earn far more than nongraduates, they have failed to build the savings that prior generations of graduates did, in no small part because their debt has consumed so much of their earnings.” From The Debt Trap by Josh Mitchell.
Those are valid points. With that said, if you could redo your own life as an 18 year old graduating high school, or in the hypothetical situation as a parent guiding a deeply loved child through ages 15-24, would you use the university system?
It absolutely depends on the skills, preferences, temperament of the individual young adult. I see kids going to university that seems a mistake or a waste of time and money. I see kids going to university that seems like a golden ticket and I would want my kids to emulate.
I do agree with many criticisms of higher ed, and I absolutely support higher ed reforms. However, I basically have zero influence. It’s important to understand the difference between the choices made as a small individual or parent living in the world as it is versus someone who has influence over how society works.
I dropped out midway through my sophomore year & joined the Air Force. Returned much wiser and more appreciative of the opportunity after my enlistment term ended. Best decision I ever made. Unless my son gets a service academy appointment, I’ll encourage him to do a hitch first as well.
The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. I can’t see anything even slightly disturbing with a market where 17% of households send out their laundry and eat prepared meals, but 17% of individuals is actually much less than 17% of households.
It’s not college, it’s high school, if not middle school. Since the 1970s, aggressive efforts by the education cartel has been employed to stop students from learning to do anything economically useful or useful for others. And now they don’t even provide reasonable schooling in the academics.
This, coupled with the reality of the modern world, should provoke a revival of the late 19th century Mind and Hand movement, which promoted learning the useful arts, training the Hand, with the academic subjects, training the Mind. The fact is that 40 years ago, much less a century ago, students needed to know a lot more of life just to get to school compared to today. And over the last 50 years the lack of a parent or other family member who can do useful things has increased. As John Ratzenberger spoke of a decade ago, back in the day, it was not beyond the pale that a Speaker of the House such as Tip O’Neill might fix his own lawn mower for weekend chores, but not today.
Thankfully, we are not dependent upon the failed education cartel system. Youtube is your daddy now, as far as learning how to do thing around the house or other things that are useful in life. This at least frees the student from the handicap of family background which has repeatedly been found to be the major factor in educational accomplishment and attainment [Coleman Report]. Schools were suppose to overcome family background difficulties but have failed for 50 years.
—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900)
Sadly, schooling has degraded back to how they were in Comenius’ time
—The Co-education of Mind and Hand, Charles H. Ham, 1890
How many of those kids live with their parents? Delaying college to live at home might not help