Well they made college and grad school cost upwards of 200k+ so no shit

Well, the price of a four year degree skyrocketed, while the financial return for most degrees is essentially zero. Not that there isn't value beyond monetary compensation to be had in getting alot of degrees but they now come packaged with a lifetime of student loan debt if you're not wealthy or lucky enough to get scholarship money.

To be clear, this is an issue with the cost, not with the degrees

I recall a podcast I listened to years ago talking about some schools trying out a new model that worked something like...

Instead of taking out a loan, you just enter into a contract with the school that x% of your paycheck for the first z years after graduation go to the school. Kinda like child support.

Get an unemployable degree and now your making burgers for minimum wage? Then you don't owe anything.

Get an amazing job that pays a ton? That degree is going to cost you.

Now it's in the school's best interest to A) offer degrees that are actually worth something instead of misleading students down a dead end path, and B) help students find and keep good positions after graduation.

It sounded awesome. But what I found infuriating were the people they interviewed that benefitted from the program, now had fantastic high salary jobs, and were whining about how much they were having to pay for the education and program that got them into that high paying job in the first place.

Conservatives: Then get a high demand and high paying job!

the field becomes too competitive and saturated and couldn't find jobs

Also conservatives: Then work in a factory!

factory jobs gets taken over by AI

Conservatives for the final and umpteenth time: Fuck you!

Community college admissions continue to rise because of this. Even students with excellent grades in high school bypass the 4-year institutions as long as possible. It's the same classes either way. Why pay 10 times more?

Duh, civilized countries make education free because it;s a net win for the country. If your politics makes that a bad, dunno, sorry for your loss...

It's an NBC news poll so I'm not sure it's easy to find much more info on the poll or its history.

Here's a chart showing previous responses:

At 18, I went to community college. During my 2 years there, I absolutely fucked my credit by getting credit cards and not paying it back.

So thinking my credit was bad, I decided I couldn't afford University. So I just decided to lie that I had a degree and just kept doing interviews and when it came down to the background checks, I didn't lie.

About 20% of the companies I got an offer for talked to the hiring manager who cared about my fake degree. The rest just turned a blind eye or didn't care.

At 46, I don't lie anymore. After 20 years in the industry, They just care about places I worked and responsibilities I had.

25% of unemployed Americans have a 4 year degree

Student debt has been increasing faster than ceo pay. Its not a sustainable system but it also will lead to more companies importing workers with hb1 visas, which is probably honestly the corporate plan.

Why pay for workers with rights to go to school when you can just import people who already have a degree you didnt pay for and who you can treat like shit?

decades of debt for a minimum wage job? Wow, hard to see why!

My job has me on college campuses several times a month, and I often speak individually with over a thousand college students a month.

There is real fear among these students. Many have done everything right, planned a career, took the classes in order since middle school to get there, took out thousands in student loans, all knowing that it will be worth it to get a good job that will pay well for an entire career...

Only to find out halfway through college that corporations are replacing all their software developers with AI, and the career path they've been following since they were a kid, no longer exists.

But they still owe their student loans, even if their Plan B career, which they hadn't considered until they couldn't find a post-graduation job in their field, pays barely more than minimum wage.

The problem is the cost of college is opaque. They show an upfront cost, but something like 2/3rds of students don’t actually pay that price. Schools have learned they can get more out of people by setting a high price and then giving “aid” discounts than charging a flat price that is affordable to everyone. Also, schools measure themselves by “prestige” and that is determined by admission rate. Schools are luxury brands and they do what luxury brands do… manufacture scarcity. The result is they’re looting the livelihoods of young adults by putting them into indentured servitude. Higher education needs to be reformed. It isn’t the fault of professors. It’s the administrators.

This can't be that shocking to the news media and "analysts". Kids have been practically railroaded into getting at least a BS for decades, a lot of the time to the tune of 10s of thousands of dollars in debt if not more. Now that nearly everyone entering the work place has one it is not the selling point to employers that it was once. Supply and demand and all that.

And that's before you even get into the usefulness of so much of the coursework in a lot of these degree programs. I only have an associates degree and probably half of the program was unrelated to the stated purpose of the degree. I can't imagine how much junk is required for a 4 year or more in the name of being a well rounded person.

Maybe, just maybe, everyone is starting to wake up to just how self serving the college industry has become.

When you come out of school carrying six figures of debt into an economy where you will never afford a house and won’t pay off the debt until you are 50. An entry level job that requires 5 years experience and pays 35000 a year. Yeah. That checks out.

Much to the joy of GOP politicians everywhere.

I've felt like this for over a decade. I don't even want to know what cost is now.

I've been telling people this for years: Post-secondary educational institutions are no longer about education; they're a business. They do everything they can to maximize profits, and don't really care about the quality of education.

Very noticeable here in the US how much college has become unaffordable and out of reach

Shows in everyday life here from the conversations to just any day to day interaction

In the media all comes out like it is made for young school kids with the words getting smaller and simpler with less sentence structures

Even if voting was not rigged here can tell with way people see our elected officials as football team members to rally behind

Higher education becoming unattainable will lead a country to poorer health, more underpaid factory workers, less quality of life for everyone, less progress, more repeated failures from history, etcetera

There are still plenty of jobs that are gated by a college credential. Tech was the biggest way aorund skipping it, and tech is imploding.

As someone absolutely killing themself to barely tread water with a fairly well paying job after getting a graduate degree, the kids are unfortunately correct.

IMO, being educated should be at least a minimum wage job, paid by the government. This would allow students to focus on learning their crafts, instead of being distracted by part-time jobs.

I never did but I’m now middle aged and stuck in my career without one. I’m right now planning on finding a competency based program to try to speedrun, so I can stop working on implementing others peoples broken garbage.

My field requires a graduate degree and a board and fieldwork. I just paid it off at 38.

Why work hard and study to die poor? Work easy and die happy

Of course it's being seen that way.

If I were to go to my university this year, doing the same course I'd have:

£9250 x 4 = £37000 for the 4 year course

£9504 x 4 = £38016 for rental accommodation including bills (I picked a rental property that included bills for ease of calculation)

£5000 x 4 = £20000 for food (based on £100/week)

That's £95016

And how much of my degree do I use day to day? Jack shit. Anyone starting my job technically does not need a degree. I work with a niche piece of software that is well known in it's field but outside of that is not. No degree would ever cover this