Amen.
Then skip college and go learn it on your own. Now that this has been settled, there’s the question of how to pay for college for those who choose to attend.
That’s my suggestion. If you want a job most of it can be picked up by starting from the bottom and working your way up. Now if you want to spend a Porsche’s worth of money just to learn how to do differential equations only to find out you didn’t need them for your job anyway and even if you did you could look up exactly how to do them in a book and then agonize over how to pay for something you didn’t have to pay for then go ahead.
That’s easy. Give your kid a realistic budget of what you’re willing to pay. Everything else is on the kid. (Hint: I didn’t go $550,000 into debt for my 5 children’s college experiences) If that means they’ll have to attend local State U rather than prestigious private college in fun college town, well welcome to life and the school of hard knocks. the sooner they learn some real-life lessons, the better for them. If they want a shingle from a nationally-recognized school, go get your Master degree from there. If you’re clever, you can get someone else to pay for it.
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I think while well-intentioned, the amount kids will actually learn is squat because they are at a stage in life where they don’t have finances to manage. Instead what they need to learn is how to look up things for which there are ample amount of resources available on how to do them and then go do them.
For example the IRS publishes exactly how to do your taxes and has resources that go into great depth explaining what a Roth IRA is and how to get one and why you should get one and all that’s needed is for you to like, just go to the website and read and then do what you read.
People can go to the library. Most won’t. I personally prefer having a society full of people who have been exposed to a variety of ideas, and libraries, while great, aren’t going to cut it.
The current system has a lot of problems to address too, though.
That advice might have applied 10 years ago but no longer. Many of the masters programs offered by elite schools are specifically designed to milk cash from rich foreigners that have very little practical value for people who are already employed.
looking up CUNY. It’s 6,930 per year, so 27,720 for 4 years, plus some fees and the cost of books.
I think this is just not true.
For one thing, text books take an enormous of effort to create and are certainly not free. So do research papers for that matter.
But beyond that, I think that a class, with students to collaborate with and a professor to ask question, can make it much easier to learn different kinds of thinking.
Classes also provide additional structure that people usually need at least before they have a college degree. After 4 years of this structure, which decreases after high school, and usually continues to decrease throughout, then hopefully they do not need it anymore and can better learn things on their own.
My response to anybody who things it is easy to learn everything on their own is that they are probably not really stretching themselves. Most of us don’t after we start a job because we don’t have time for formal classes.
This is all very relevant to the question of the how much the state should pay for college, because it is really about the value of a college education. There is no reason for the state to pay for any of it if people can simply use google and online textbooks to learn things on their own. My own experience of how people seem to educate themselves on issues like climate change and vaccines is that people seem to be very bad at learning these things on their own.
If you can’t learn calculus on your own then your high school or social environment failed you. I’ve got a book on my shelf. You open the book, start on page one, and then after that you go on to the next page. If you don’t understand the material then you go back down to the prerequisites, trig and algebra. Open those books, start on page one…
It’s a simple procedure. Maybe if you were trying to learn something for which there aren’t literally thousands of books available going though in great detail exactly how to do those things then you need a person helping you. But for most of the things people learn in undergrad? It’s not 21st century mathematics here. Not even 20th century unless the students happen to be ambitious.
Did we take any courses for the 5 upper exams we had to complete to get our credentials? No, we read the papers and then passed the tests.
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There are all sorts of topics in math that i can no longer imagine how i could have ever found them tricky. That includes calculus.
But I remember it being hard at the time. I explain this incongruity as a consequence of the curse of expertise. This is part of why new college professors often have an easier time teaching advanced graduate classes than with introductory courses.
The upper level exams are not exactly comparable. They are about learning a trade at the same time you are practicing the trade. But still most people use study guides, online seminars, and online discussion groups to get a lot of the benefits of a class. All this might imply we should look at virtualizing more classes in some way, but doesn’t support those classes having no value.
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I looked it up and my alma mater is over $33K per year, in-state and more for out-of-state.
So for in-state that’s $132,000 for a 4-year degree assuming no real tuition increases.
Of course if you’re getting financial aid that might reduce that.
When I went it was under $10K per year. 
with a lot of schools, the “fees” are significant and can increase the price by up to 50% (it’s one of tricks the schools like to play, “tuition has only gone up 6% (but tuition & fees have gone up 9%)”.
My question is whether this has gone up to pay for bigger dorms, fancy gyms and lazy rivers, state of the art athletic centers, etc, to compete with other schools. Or is it less tractable issues like high wages for professors.
I think part of it is nicer facilities, and part of it is more administrative positions.
Every school now has an army of diversity / inclusion administrators / staff, and more staff aimed at helping retain low-performing students. It’s no longer “look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t graduate”.
All those administrators don’t work for free.
Now reasonable people can disagree on how much of that is appropriate, but I think it’s largely responsible for the price increase.
States cutting funding has hurt slightly, but I think the single biggest factor is the increase in non-instructional positions on a per-student basis.
I don’t believe that professors are making materially more than they used to. Possibly at a few prestigious research institutions, but I don’t think that’s a significant driver of costs on a national level.
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I wonder how much is due to parents. My parents paid for me. I’ll probably pay my kid’s way. I’m not rich or whatever, but I make enough money that I don’t give a fuuuuuuu. You want an art degree out of state? go for it kiddo, be the next Rembrandt.
And I think part of the problem is the Race to the Bottom in the job application process. I don’t think anyone here thinks college should be necessary for actuarial work, but we all work for employers that automatically screen applicants without a degree, because they can.
I would qualify your statement by saying high wages for some professors. More and more courses are being taught be adjuncts who often scrape together a living of less than 50k a year with no benefits by teaching five courses a semester at three different institutions, At the same time research based schools pay very high salaries to research stars who may teach one course a semester to graduate students.
At the same time the proportion of money going to administrators has significantly increased. As an example most schools today will have a vp for diversity equity and inclusion who will make more than most full professors.
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I think it should be in the vast majority of cases.
Almost everybody needs college to learn math well enough to pass the actuarial exams.
Additionally, I think good math skills will also be required for many actuaries to adjust to changes being created by data science.
But actuaries are a profession. Professions tend to involve specialized languages and concepts that are not readily learned “on the job”, although job experience is needed to reinforce and understanding of them.
However I would agree that most jobs that currently require a college degree do not need the skills (if any) acquired with the degree.
I think this was the sweet nothings whispered by the democrats to the chunks of white working class they started to abandon in the 90s, in part with nafta: these manufacturing jobs will be replaced by better ones that require more education. College was supposed to be how everybody got a piece of the pie made larger by free trade.
It didn’t work, obviously. Instead we got jobs that shouldn’t require a college degree but do, and the high cost of college seems to make social mobility harder.
It also can be used to support an attitude that a person who didn’t go to college should not expect economic security. At least unless you are a minority, in which case it probably isn’t your fault that you did to go to college. And I have no idea how much that description of this attitude is a straw man; i kind of worry it mostly isn’t.