Less kids are enrolling in college due to several factors. A decline in birthrates (right around the 2008 recession), a decline in those who calculate that college provides a real return on investment and the cost of lost opportunity, and also a third strike in the form of federal funding cuts.
There's a bunch of example case sob story, a lot of emotional focus. Yet I didn't see much (obvious) about any positive paths forward.
It's far too late at this stage to prop up schools that are surplus relative to population. Re-purposing them for other educational tasks or possibly businesses (rather than just a shooting range complex) might be happening elsewhere.
College could be made less of a rat-race hassle. The core aspects of an education and experience in college probably should be more fool-proof (all the classes delivered as a scheduled package that works, threaded for multiple years with a couple slack openings for retakes). With some slack time built in for making up a dropped class or three (not entirely skipped semesters!). Also social mixer and electives courses. Though crack down on the crazy party stuff, moderation is key, and as a tea toter, I'd like to suggest a very strong look at banning all mind altering drugs (including alcohol, other than limited quantities for cooking) during the educational years.
As far as the question of if college is worth it? That might differ from person to person. Trades / Vocational work can also be fulfilling and maybe some people might enjoy that. We all need mechanics, electricians, and construction workers. Though those jobs might seriously benefit from some augmentation / automation / tech to prevent worker burn out and body damage.
Burn out and body damage from trades is not really factually based, especially not compared to something like software. You can actually quantify this. For instance the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50.
By contrast in software there is extreme defacto age discrimination. I don't think it's usually real age discrimination but simply companies don't really value experience in software much, and so somebody with many years years of experience is often seen as less desirable than somebody with little to no experience, but who you can pay a far lesser wage to. Whatever the reason, the point is that software is, for most, going to be a relatively short-lived career.
I can't find a good source for the data on the age of developers, though there are a million blog style or Q/A posts bemoaning the increasing difficultly finding a job as developers age. The Stack Overflow survey [2] is probably not representative, but matches observation at least, with a median age in the younger side of the 25-34 bracket. And that brief window of time you have in software is after you [typically] spend 4 years in college, and then spend however many years paying off your college debt before you finally get to enjoy your full salary.
And obviously I am speaking big picture here. There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22. And there are software developers still coding at 50. But these are rare exceptions, and not the rule in either case.
Body damage math isn’t even close. BLS puts non-fatal injuries in construction at 2.3 cases per 100 FTEs. For computer systems design it’s 0.1 – that’s a 23× gap.whole job takes a toll over time.
The median age of 42 just means a lot of sore 40-somethings can’t afford to quit yet. Age alone doesn’t tell you how their knees and backs feel after 20 years of rebar.
Not sure how many people you know in the industry but most architects, managers, etc... are 40+ years old. Not even remotely difficult to get hired as a senior engineer, way more in demand than 20 years old devs
> Burn out and body damage from trades is not really factually based, especially not compared to something like software.
Your assertion isn't factually based - it's just another baseless claim on the Internet.
I don't know the factual basis about the harm labor does - it's one of those things that generally don't need it for most people - but basic knowledge and reasoning is that hard, and repetitive, physical labor daily for decades is going to cause some real physical problems. Most white-collar workers I know over 40 have bad backs. I know college kids who didn't last a summer on a worksite.
And as much better evidence, we have generations of reporting on it from the people who do physical labor. Those people have also long said they worked so their kids to do something different. I've never heard one who agreed with you - I've never heard anyone who agreed with you.
If it's so great, do you think many developers in SV would take construction jobs if they paid more? Managers? Other white-collar workers? Out in the cold and rain? No remote working for those jobs. :)
> There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22.
There are many other injuries - losing fingers and toes, serious traumatic injuries to every part of the body. I knew a painter who fell off a ladder, fell three stories and landed in the splits. But they had a family and they were back at it as soon as they healed; it wasn't without pain. If you do it every day for decades, how do you never fall from the ladder?
> the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50.
True - but my alma mater (midwest liberal arts school) has had a CS program since the 1970s and added programs like data science over the past decade, plus always had a 3+2 engineering partnership with another school. In the small PNW town where I now live, the liberal arts college added a CS program a few years ago plus also had a 3+2 engineering partnership for decades. So my point is - even for those students who wanted to do something STEM related, these liberal arts schools started augmenting their programs a long time ago.
We all need mechanics, electricians, and construction workers.
I know people whose kids skipped university and went to vocational school to become electricians or plumbers. Almost all of them have failed to land jobs, and every job they apply for they're competing with dozens of applicants. The one that got a job was forced to move halfway across the country to some rural town in the middle of nowhere to get that job.
We may all need mechanics and electricians but no one seems to want to hire an inexperienced mechanic or electrician.
The title is misleading. As the article itself notes, "Large flagship universities—blessed with strong academic reputations and high-profile sports programs—continue to boost local economies".
It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities?
You can do that in many institutions, why would you pick an institution with little reputation in these depressed cities?
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
I think after industrialization we started realizing how advanced knowledge of complex topics can multiply our impact and wealth. No wonder all nations strived to educate their people and their people aspired to go to colleges and get higher specialized degrees.
The reality is that the economy cannot occupy all these specialists and still requires a ton of fungible generalists. In fact we made so many specialists that themselves became fungible. Look at the tech layoffs, they casually throw under the bus industry legends, simply because everyone has become nearly replaceable.
And even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
And why should you sacrifice the ability to connect with opportunity just because you wanted to expand your mind? It's unfortunate that people should be presented with this forced choice.
Totally doable online from a beautiful beach in a much more affordable area. ChatGPT is better than a lot of professors I had and I went to a top tier university for my area of study, professors mostly were just there to do research and either weren't good teachers or didn't care to be.
Students entering smaller colleges now have to ask themselves more than ever whether their university will be open in four years when they plan to graduate. With increasing closures of private and public colleges alike, I’m sure this will continue to fuel the flight from regional schools to state flagships.
Now really seems like an opportune moment for one of these third-tier colleges to rebrand itself as a trade school but aimed at students that would have otherwise gone to college (and not the traditional trade school audience.) I bet there is a ton of demand for a trades-based education but in a college experience wrapper.
I disagree. The changes a school would need to make to the school, the curriculum, and the faculty to switch from teaching accounting or gender studies to welding or HVAC would mean you'd be pasting an expensive University of Misc State logo and mascot onto a whole new enterprise, implicitly putting a premium on an educational path that's really all about ROI.
I think many people would be willing to pay that premium for a college experience. And from the college's point of view, changing focus is certainly better than shutting down completely.
Anyone who looked at demographic trends 10+ years ago knew that this was coming. As far back as the late 90s, it was clear that universities were overinvesting into the one of the last echos of the baby boom.
A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today.
I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.
So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.
Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.
When the Dutch government cut funding for universities they found a new cash cow: foreigners!
But for Chinese students the Netherlands is exotic nobody wants to go to Missouri I guess.
(Ironically the government is now complaining that there are too many foreigners and that everyone is speaking English).
Xenophobia is an automatic signal of ignorance/stupidity/insecurity.
I worked with a Chinese-American naturalized citizen who moved from PGP/Symantec to work at Stanford just long enough to get his kid the tuition discount (10 years still?). That's real love, dedication, and sacrifice for one's kids.
> But for Chinese students the Netherlands is exotic nobody wants to go to Missouri I guess.
They used to go to these schools. There just aren't that many Chinese anymore either.
A decade ago, UIUC (mentioned in the article) was derisively called the "University of Indians and Chinese". Now, UIUC's Chinese admissions collapsed [0] - a trend that happened in every university.
The same thing will happen with Indian students within a decade, because Green Card waiting periods act as a quasi-thousands talents program, and you can demand an EU level tech salary in India with US (especially SV, Seattle, or NYC) work experience.
Already, a couple of my peers who worked at top ML labs in the Bay have begun transferring to the Indian branches of American R&D labs and/or taking faculty positions at top universites, when barely 15 years ago you would be hard pressed to find an American educated CS professor from a school like MIT, UIUC, or UW in India.
> UIUC's Chinese admissions collapsed [0] - a trend that happened in every university.
Is this a new trend that started in COVID? Because I was very plugged into the Chinese-studying-in-the-US trend from the China side, and I can tell you that it was still booming as of 2017.
At least these students physically are in Netherlands? Over here there are many "private universities/academias" with students from outside of EU but they are permanently on "scholarship in Africa" or "yoga classes in India". It's basically a foot in the door for the EU stay permit.
Musing - Universities historically were easy to create in rural/underdeveloped areas with cheap land. (Particularly the ag/tech variant funded by the federal government.) A very small number aggregated enough people to generate sustained urbanization. The rest have always been tenuous in the sense that they exist because of a state-federal consensus that they are worth subsidizing. Without this, urban/suburban universities are more likely to sustain themselves.
Further thought - on the timescale of history, professors have always been (lower) middle class. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see a return to the mean…
Readit News
Less kids are enrolling in college due to several factors. A decline in birthrates (right around the 2008 recession), a decline in those who calculate that college provides a real return on investment and the cost of lost opportunity, and also a third strike in the form of federal funding cuts.
There's a bunch of example case sob story, a lot of emotional focus. Yet I didn't see much (obvious) about any positive paths forward.
It's far too late at this stage to prop up schools that are surplus relative to population. Re-purposing them for other educational tasks or possibly businesses (rather than just a shooting range complex) might be happening elsewhere.
College could be made less of a rat-race hassle. The core aspects of an education and experience in college probably should be more fool-proof (all the classes delivered as a scheduled package that works, threaded for multiple years with a couple slack openings for retakes). With some slack time built in for making up a dropped class or three (not entirely skipped semesters!). Also social mixer and electives courses. Though crack down on the crazy party stuff, moderation is key, and as a tea toter, I'd like to suggest a very strong look at banning all mind altering drugs (including alcohol, other than limited quantities for cooking) during the educational years.
As far as the question of if college is worth it? That might differ from person to person. Trades / Vocational work can also be fulfilling and maybe some people might enjoy that. We all need mechanics, electricians, and construction workers. Though those jobs might seriously benefit from some augmentation / automation / tech to prevent worker burn out and body damage.
By contrast in software there is extreme defacto age discrimination. I don't think it's usually real age discrimination but simply companies don't really value experience in software much, and so somebody with many years years of experience is often seen as less desirable than somebody with little to no experience, but who you can pay a far lesser wage to. Whatever the reason, the point is that software is, for most, going to be a relatively short-lived career.
I can't find a good source for the data on the age of developers, though there are a million blog style or Q/A posts bemoaning the increasing difficultly finding a job as developers age. The Stack Overflow survey [2] is probably not representative, but matches observation at least, with a median age in the younger side of the 25-34 bracket. And that brief window of time you have in software is after you [typically] spend 4 years in college, and then spend however many years paying off your college debt before you finally get to enjoy your full salary.
And obviously I am speaking big picture here. There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22. And there are software developers still coding at 50. But these are rare exceptions, and not the rule in either case.
[1] - https://www.nahb.org/blog/2023/06/age-of-construction-workfo...
[2] - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/developer-profile#demog...
The median age of 42 just means a lot of sore 40-somethings can’t afford to quit yet. Age alone doesn’t tell you how their knees and backs feel after 20 years of rebar.
Not sure how many people you know in the industry but most architects, managers, etc... are 40+ years old. Not even remotely difficult to get hired as a senior engineer, way more in demand than 20 years old devs
Your assertion isn't factually based - it's just another baseless claim on the Internet.
I don't know the factual basis about the harm labor does - it's one of those things that generally don't need it for most people - but basic knowledge and reasoning is that hard, and repetitive, physical labor daily for decades is going to cause some real physical problems. Most white-collar workers I know over 40 have bad backs. I know college kids who didn't last a summer on a worksite.
And as much better evidence, we have generations of reporting on it from the people who do physical labor. Those people have also long said they worked so their kids to do something different. I've never heard one who agreed with you - I've never heard anyone who agreed with you.
If it's so great, do you think many developers in SV would take construction jobs if they paid more? Managers? Other white-collar workers? Out in the cold and rain? No remote working for those jobs. :)
> There are people who have a catastrophic injury in the trades and live the rest of their life on disability from age 22.
There are many other injuries - losing fingers and toes, serious traumatic injuries to every part of the body. I knew a painter who fell off a ladder, fell three stories and landed in the splits. But they had a family and they were back at it as soon as they healed; it wasn't without pain. If you do it every day for decades, how do you never fall from the ladder?
> the median age of a construction worker is 42. [1] In some states it's pushing near 50.
Many have no choice.
I know people whose kids skipped university and went to vocational school to become electricians or plumbers. Almost all of them have failed to land jobs, and every job they apply for they're competing with dozens of applicants. The one that got a job was forced to move halfway across the country to some rural town in the middle of nowhere to get that job.
We may all need mechanics and electricians but no one seems to want to hire an inexperienced mechanic or electrician.
It's the second and third-tier institutions located in economically depressed areas, like the one profiled here (Western Illinois University’s Macomb campus), that are suffering. After all, why would you fork out a lot of money for a diploma that's worth little and won't even connect you with local job opportunities?
To learn, to sharpen your mind, to grow and change yourself.
The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.
Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
The reality is that the economy cannot occupy all these specialists and still requires a ton of fungible generalists. In fact we made so many specialists that themselves became fungible. Look at the tech layoffs, they casually throw under the bus industry legends, simply because everyone has become nearly replaceable.
And even from a societal perspective you would think that with more knowledge we would become more tolerant, more rational etc etc. Well how did that work out?
College is great but 1) Not for everybody and 2) only the rich can pay 50K-400K to "sharpen their minds" without a high-paying job in the other end.
We need more middle class jobs that don't require a 4-year college degree
Deleted Comment
I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.
So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.
1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...
A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry.
In fact the way things are going Africa will probably end up as the nursery of the world for a few decades. Then birth rates will collapse there too.
The robots should be ready then
(Ironically the government is now complaining that there are too many foreigners and that everyone is speaking English).
I worked with a Chinese-American naturalized citizen who moved from PGP/Symantec to work at Stanford just long enough to get his kid the tuition discount (10 years still?). That's real love, dedication, and sacrifice for one's kids.
They used to go to these schools. There just aren't that many Chinese anymore either.
A decade ago, UIUC (mentioned in the article) was derisively called the "University of Indians and Chinese". Now, UIUC's Chinese admissions collapsed [0] - a trend that happened in every university.
The same thing will happen with Indian students within a decade, because Green Card waiting periods act as a quasi-thousands talents program, and you can demand an EU level tech salary in India with US (especially SV, Seattle, or NYC) work experience.
Already, a couple of my peers who worked at top ML labs in the Bay have begun transferring to the Indian branches of American R&D labs and/or taking faculty positions at top universites, when barely 15 years ago you would be hard pressed to find an American educated CS professor from a school like MIT, UIUC, or UW in India.
[0] - https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/29/university-il...
Is this a new trend that started in COVID? Because I was very plugged into the Chinese-studying-in-the-US trend from the China side, and I can tell you that it was still booming as of 2017.
Further thought - on the timescale of history, professors have always been (lower) middle class. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see a return to the mean…