It's a prime example of the tragedy of the commons and there's honestly not much that can be done because of how competition on the supply side of the labor market works; for employers, a degree is no longer a differentiator among candidates.

It isn’t in that it doesn’t guarantee a job, but not having one all but guarantees HR drones will discard your CV algorithmically.

Consider the contraposition.

• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.

• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.

It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.

Of course there is. You can just hire them and train them. Most positions don't require college degrees. Everything you need to know for most jobs you learned in high school. At most you need a certificate program of some kind.

Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".

Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".

I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.

If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.

Employers would let people be hired but any sort of employer based assessment opens the company up to accusations of discrimination. This was litigated. Many companies got in trouble decades ago. And then all companies turned to college degrees and the American consumer was fleeced for good

> Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".

I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.

- bookkeeper

- billing (esp. medical)

- data entry

- admin assistant

- inventory management

- basic tax filing

- content manager (for websites and social media)

- scheduling

- basic account management

- tons of stuff in supply chain

I could go on…

Most office work. Finance. Insurance. Mortgage sales. Blue collar jobs. Inspection and compliance. Program management, project management, graphics design, marketing. A lot of software work that doesn't require proof based mathematics (most of it). Your lack of lateral thinking is not an argument.

Unless my kid was interested in a professorship or the hard sciences or a hard science aspect of engineering work or a specific certificate (architect), I would not encourage college. Seems like a waste of money making years. It can make sense if you're a first generation college person and you were not raised well off, but most people here are in the upper income brackets, so adopting the culture of the upper class is not really something they'd need to do

Make money not a consideration in applying for college? Not by handing out whatever the universities are asking for of course, but by giving them a fixed $X per student.

That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.

You have a president that’s willing to wage war on institutions of higher learning. If anything this is the only time it’s even been remotely possible.

You have better employment options only if there are not enough people with degrees. If you give everybody the option of obtaining a degree then nobody is better off. In fact those at the bottom of the barrel end up in an even worse position.

The difference is that printing money creates more money, but doesn't create any more stuff. College degrees (theoretically) create more educated people. If you just "hand out" degrees, that doesn't happen, but if you actually teach people, then it does.

I agree with you.

The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.

What happens when a large number of college graduates enter a tough hiring market while they have five- (or even six-) figure student loan balances? It’s one thing to work at McDonald’s debt-free with a high school diploma; it’s another thing to end up at McDonald’s with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a bachelor’s degree.

Of course, there’s more to going to college than career prospects, and there’s also the reality that no one is owed a job. Still, given the amount of adults struggling with paying off their student loans, it’s no wonder more people are reevaluating the economic value of going to college.

All this states is expensive degrees aren't worth it, not paid for education.

> The problem is that many young Americans for the past 30+ years has been told that a bachelor’s degree is the prerequisite for a job that pays well enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, which I’ll define as being able to afford owning a home in a safe neighborhood and being able to provide for a household without living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Told by who?

My anecdote isn't quite the same, but it's along the lines of many adults, not just one's parents: While in high school I constantly got the message on how important it was to stay in school and graduate with a high school diploma. Ironically I passed up the chance to have an associate's degree before my 18th birthday, because I absorbed this message so well that I prioritized high school graduation over the A.S.. It was years later (round about the time I finally finished that A.S. at the age of 29) that I realized the message hadn't been meant for me, but for the students who were at risk of dropping out of high school.

Well for starters, perhaps the older homeowners who live in safe neighborhoods and provide for [young Americans] without living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Their parents.

Yeah that's unfortunate then, America has changed so much in the past 10-15 years that advice that was worth following for the previous generation is just totally useless for the current circumstances. I don't think the parents had bad intentions though, they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.

> they were just overly-optimistic in assuming the prosperity they enjoyed would continue indefinitely.

What worries me is how they came to believe this in spite of the last 10-15 years of change in the country…while possibly raising around 3 generations of high school graduates throughout.

Educated people are the way they are due to a particular personality that they have. They are curious and self driven. Many educated people have no formal education. You cannot teach a personality.

That's not to say other personalities are less worthwhile... It's just that we have emphasized one kind of personality as the ultimate one and then are surprised that -- after maxing out opportunities for those already suited towards that personality -- a saturation point is reached and future effort has marginal gains.

What's wonderful about comprehensive universities is that there's a program that can excite the interest of almost every personality.

And even if that wasn't the case, education in general actually speaks to a variety of personalities: The self-motivated learner, the self-improver, the intellectual explorer, the goal-oriented achiever, the rules-based structure seeker.

I like to call this degree inflation.