The Value of Sending Your Kids to College

The Sandbox Political Topics
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My experience here is that at a good junior college, you have multiple tracks: one for those going to college, one for those who aren’t, and the two are clearly identified so students know which is which and are taught at the appropriate level.

A lousy junior college? It does exactly what you mention because we’re getting paid anyway, what do we care if the kids learn anything? That leads to apathetic teachers, which leads to poor quality learning, which … you can figure it out from there. Reminds me of one place I know of which “correctly identified” the cause of poor student grades, morale and attendance as not all the teachers openly complaining about how they hated their jobs and hated administration and how long they had until they retired, but rather “kids are playing cards in the cafeteria when they should be in class.”

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It doesn’t? Why not?

I’m not disputing that high tuition currently makes this difficult, but I’m not sure why working through college is bad in and of itself.

I know lots of people roughly my age who did this. If you’re not lucky enough to have parents pay for it or get a scholarship, then I don’t see why this would be bad.

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I mean in the literal financial sense.

If you make $X/hour before college.
And you make $2X/hour after college.
Then paying for college with the second job takes half as long.

I know that’s a simplistic scenario (maybe you gain efficiencies by doing both at the same time) but the basic math lends itself to using debt.

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Curious, your circumstances were similiar to mine(though we were closer to poverty level poor). That made my early university years much worse. I had the worst money management skills ever.
I’d think that being poor should make you smarter and more appreciative like it did you. But it didn’t stick for me.
Perhaps because there were other factors. I left home and never really returned, either home or to anyone back home. I couldn’t wait to sever that entire life.

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I am not a huge fan of standardized tests after the end of high school. I found the non-subject GREs were a complete waste of time, for example.

I think all my training made me do worse on the (non-subject) math GRE than I did on the SAT in high school. Those four years of training had made me much slower and more careful in my math work. This was extremely important for real world thinking, where problems might take days, months or even years, and a small mistake was very costly. (I had to learn to be even more careful in my professional work.) But it hurt me on a timed, standardized test, where the goal was to pick the right bubble.

Not “what is truth”, but definitely “how do we know truth?”. Trying to measure “critical thinking” is as ambitious as that.

When I google “critical thinking”, I get: “ Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing , applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” That is a good start, as far as I’m concerned.

But maybe it’s better to just say we seem to have different ideas about how hard it is to measure critical thinking. If I read you right, you think that standardized tests represent an established and reliable method to do this. I am very skeptical about that. This may be something else we won’t be able to resolve in a forum like this one.

This is a good question that I don’t have an answer for. But in my mind, it is important to carve out an education focused on learning, thinking, and communicating from vocational training. This would include bachelors degrees in science and the arts from the traditional subjects, and maybe new ones consistent with this same mission.

There will always be some ambiguity between educating a person to “think” (being shorthand for learning, thinking, communicating), and vocational training. This can be dangerous. Paying 100K for a masters degree in creative writing is destructive for anybody not independently wealthy. But this doesn’t mean the degree is not worthwhile; it is just not vocational training, and we shouldn’t understand it economically as if it were.

Just as destructive would be treating a degree in art history as if it were supposed to be vocational training, and removing all support for it because it doesn’t function well in that role.

For pure research, this looks like politicians having larger discussions about the place of funding among our other priorities. It does not consist of trying to write standardized tests for individual research topics.

Similarly, for higher education, I do not think it should take the form of standardized tests. Instead, it should be a larger discussion about what education has done for free society over the last 25, 50, 100, 200 years, and what it can do in the future.

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I don’t know what your age is twig and don’t want to assume but the cost of college education has increased at a rate well about inflation, while increases in the minimum wage for part time jobs has not even kept up with inflation. So what was possible 10, 20, 30 years ago with a part time job and college with little or no loans might still be possible today, but it’s a heck of a lot harder.

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209

I agree that reducing your class load in order to work more hours wouldn’t make sense.

But I think for a lot of college kids that isn’t the choice. The college may restrict the number of courses they can take, and they may be able to find jobs that either allow them to study on the job or enhance their resume or simply give their brains a rest.

I would say that I had all three types of jobs in college. I worked at the bell desk in the dorms where I spent at least half of the time studying for the most part. (Less if it was a Friday/Saturday night in which case I was socializing with the residents coming & going more, or a friend/boyfriend would come hang out with me.)

I ran help sessions for Calculus students, working under the tutelage of a Dean who wrote me a nice letter of recommendation which was useful when I was looking for a “real job”.

And I waited tables. Which was fun and gave my brain a rest and allowed me to have a car on a “no car campus”, which was a priority to me.

I don’t think I would have finished college any faster if I hadn’t had those jobs and quite frankly, I wouldn’t have really wanted to try. :woman_shrugging:

But I averaged 16 credits per semester anyway. And I was never working a ton of hours… but some.

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“And you make $2X/hour after college” ignores the possibility of not making that, all the what ifs that can occur.

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I’m not sure that my money management skills were any better (probably still aren’t) - I ran pretty low on credit in the final year, but I also had the bf who was taking care of his half (at least at that time).

I also left home to never really return. When I go back to visit it’s for my mum, who really just took the husband-supports-wife approach to life and never really recovered post two divorces. If she had the money, she would have given it to me without question.

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Sure, just slap on a probability and a borrowing rate and add something about getting to dive a car, and we’ll have an exam 2 practice problem.

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I disagree that the time frame is shorter overall by NOT taking that other job.

I also believe that the $1 today might have more value today than that $2 I might get in two or three years.

Not to mention that the job I have today just might get me that interview over that other kid that isn’t working now.

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Ignoring that probability is how we’ve created a significant population of young people with crippling education debt. Over the last forty years the divergence of the cost of education and the cost of living versus the income for unskilled labor has created financial cliffs for anyone that slips. Combine that with the behemoth of the education unable (unwilling?) to keep up with the changing demands in the economy and we have more people overburdened.

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Right, YMMV, I can’t argue except for the middle part. It takes longer than that for $1 to become $2.

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Hahahha. I mean, assuming that you’ve already decided to go to college.

Maybe college is not worth the money at all, which is a fair point. It’s super expensive and very well might not pay for itself. I agree that it’s a good idea to have more limits on what people can borrow.

The probability doesn’t matter much for the decision of whether to borrow or pay in cash. The probability matters an awful lot for how much to pay.

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But $1 >>>> $0.

Also, $1 now + $2 later >> $2 later.

Perhaps I’ve missed something earlier, though. I’m thinking that the $1 now is while earning that degree.

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No, it’s a fair point. It working extra to make more money is no issue, then working extra to make more money is no issue

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The cost of education is very high due to government backed student loans. Remove the federal government student loan program and the costs will plummet. Student loans shift the responsible parties for maintaining costs onto the shoulders of 18 year olds.

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True, but depending on your major your wage may well not be doubled either.

I think waiting tables you can make around $15 an hour (maybe more, depending on the restaurant) which is pretty similar to starting pay for a teacher.

The teacher will eventually make materially more, but right off… not that different. Maybe even less. If they are substitute teaching to begin then definitely less.

An actuarial student… sure. But not all jobs straight out of college pay as well as actuarial student jobs.

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Well, split between 18 year olds and their wealthy parents.

But yes, I agree, loans should be reduced.

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What part of “simplified” do you guys not understand!!!

Anyway, you should also note, starting your career early is worth a lot more than the immediate salary bump because it means all of experience based raises/promotions/benefits will occur that much sooner.

The comparison is really messy, in fact, from a life perspective. It’s cleaner just to compare hours worked doing X vs hours worked doing Y. (And further acknowledge that maybe you don’t mind doing X at all, because it let’s you drive a car.)