Right in the headline is a word choice I've notice lately that irks me, "democratization".
"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. In voting, "more access" means "more governing power" (in principle), but in other things, it does not.
If you want to use "democratized" applied to higher-ed, it would mean more people are involved in the decision-making, leadership, or ownership.
It could be that HN commnter replying to submission about education in the United States indicating that he is "irked" by the term "democratisation" is not located within the United States but rather in a non-English speaking country not initiallu founded upon "democratic" principles (cf. United States) and with a dissimilar history of "democracy". As such, his interpetation of this term could have different meaning to him than the journalist working for The Atlantic who resides within the United States and is employed by one of its academic institutions
Right. But it's not my favorite nerd snipe interpretation that allows me to post low effort comments on hackernews about the headline instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion about the article.
"Democratize"? I thought that was when you rent an AI tool built on stolen intellectual property to write, draw, code, etc. for you because you never bothered to learn those skills yourself and convinced yourself they were being gatekept.
It really changed during the Clinton administration, where rules were established for student loans that pretty much ensured almost anyone who wanted to go to college could go to college. Since then tuition rates have dramatically exceeded inflation though. There's also the issue in that a lot of private/commercial colleges have optimized their pricing to where most people drop out to extract maximum value from the system, pretty much leaving people often unable to complete their programs the final year or half year.
I think that the opportunity for funding should have higher ties to economic demand for certain degree programs over others. I'm not opposed to people that want to go to arts programs in college, but I'm not sure that they should be taxpayer funded necessarily.
I have thought that areas where we bring in foreign workers should largely be offset with higher employer taxes and those taxes funding grants for domestic study into the fields in question. I also think we need a much broader set of trade schools for more industries than typical. Even with technology and programming.
In terms of lower high school graduation rates, I think we've dumbed down and taken things to the lowest common denominator in an extreme fashion. Common-core has failed, along with "new math" and other more modern teaching methods. My great grandmother was a teacher, and I've seen some of the text books they used in the pre-1960s, the coverage was much more thorough and difficult even at a 5th grade level than what many kids today see through the end of high school.
There should be plenty of room for vocational study as well as traditional study... but we need to stop just giving kids a pass because they're a certain age when they don't understand the core curriculem.
Isn't more people attending college, and thus choosing where to go with their pocket book, the 'control'.
The people control, through voting by choosing where to attend, based on what is offered. So if someplace is not offering much that anybody wants, they don't get students, and go out of business.
The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
Not that I agree that money should control learning. I'd like to go back to more hardcore reading/writing/arithmetic/Compiler Design. But nobody digs that.
> The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
I guess I'm saying, yes, that is how it often used. I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
In the 90's when Linux was taking off, did people say Torvalds has "democratized Unix"? (honest question - I'm not sure.)
Compare with the governing structures of public universities in (most of?) Germany where there is a "senate" composed of elected representatives of professors, students, and administrative and academic staff. Now that is approaching democratic control.
I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years).
I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate.
There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate
That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market.
I'd interpret that as 11% of CS grads are finding appropriate jobs (not underemployment) within a set amount of time after graduation. That data from the fed includes all people aged 22-27 with a bachelor's degree.
Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
That's the way I interpreted it, too. A CS grad working at Home Depot stocking shelves or an accounting grad working at Starbucks would not count toward unemployment figures, but it's probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate.
Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
Yea, I'd call that underemployed. Does that mean 80% of recent college grads are employed in their area of study? I would be shocked if that were true.
Underemployment in the Fed’s data is defined as working any job where at least 50% of people in the job field say you don’t need a college degree. So 80% of recent grads are working in jobs where the perception is you need a degree. Which with the insane requirements for entry level jobs could still be underemployment from a practical perspective
The census data you linked lists unemployment and underemployment for graduates aged 22-27. Assuming nontraditional graduates are a relatively small minority, that's a 5 year window after graduation.
I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong.
In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.
The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:
> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas.
College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.
We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM.
A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees, both of which are considerably more expensive.
Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
> Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees
For what it's worth, I see arguments like this all the time. Might just be the corner of the information ecosystem you hang out in.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
Maybe it did in the past, where the greatest marginal gains were. Does it still hold true now? Over a third of the US has a bachelor's degree. Is there a reliably positive ROI to society in taking that third to, say, half?
> Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all
> A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements
I don't believe those strong assertions you're making were uncontroversial at any time, and are likely objectively less true now than they were in the past.
You're both right. College is beneficial to society. And it costs way too much to deliver right now.
You could copy-paste these statements to describe American healthcare vs European healthcare and get a very different reaction. Even though it's true for that field too.
Why the actual fuck does a humanities degree cost anywhere near as much as an engineering degree? Literally all you need is some professors and a space to teach in. You could run them in co-working spaces, parks (weather permitting), or coffee shops ffs, with no administrative staff or other bloat. (For real: small seminars in a coffee shop or a public park would be dope)
Education is beneficial to society and making it cheaper makes it more widely accessible. You and the person you responded to actually agree on a lot.
There have been several attempts to raise the bar for Community Colleges to offer Bachelors programs... the existing universities and entrenched professional programs have fought it tooth and nail.
My daughter got her associates carrying no debt... but has struggled to get into an appropriate higher level program. She's currently working PT in two jobs, one as a prep cook in a high end eatery and as a park associate at the local zoo. Neither is offering a particularly compelling pay or benefits that most jobs should offer IMO.
I'm with you on college though, in terms of there should be way cheaper options all around... I think there should even be grant programs for better vocational/trade programs as an alternative path for Bachelors class degrees.
God I wish community college would be subsidized. Some states now cover it for your first degree which is a great start and some also are now starting to subsidize courses for retirees but man I would so love to just go and do like random courses I have no intention of pursuing a career in.
European universities are not resorts like in the US and community college keep that small footprint mentality as well. They have done it right. Focus on the education and keep costs lower. I have friends in Europe that work for a few years then just take time off and study something that interests them in their subsidized universities and I am so jealous because their costs are so low.
When I went to community college (and then university) there were a few moments where I actually wasn't treading water in my CS degree and I was able to take a wide variety of classes. They were some of the happiest moments of my life.
Recently visited LA and walked around LACC during the evening. The campus is enormous (and famously was the scene for the TV show Community). I just thought of the enormous variety of subjects being taught, imagine if that was accessible to anyone when they desired.
Yes just rechecked and you are right. I am not a CA native (was just visiting LA) and so happy to see that this is available. I originally thought they just subsidized degrees for only "first degree" seeking students. Maybe I need to move to LA. My local CC is $225 per credit for in state residents.
I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this.
Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay.
I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone?
This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that.
Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share
When I graduated in the early 2010s I recall the number was closer to ~35%. Honestly given the economy today and the expectations of employers of having a college degree for even basic stuff, these numbers seem pretty low.
In Europe only about 43% have a college degree. So even with heavily subsidized schools there is really only a certain percentage of people that take this path.
Well yeah, trades suck ass. There are alot of dudes in cushy well paid office gigs extolling the virtues of trade work.
It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
And a bunch of tech peeps are overweight physically out of shape with other health effects as bad as what you're saying about trades. Humans get old.
I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
Im not denigrating anyone. I worked dairy farms from age 7 to 23.
It’s a brutal lifestyle and I’ve seen my share of hardworking, broken 50 year olds trying to make it mostly on the lesser paying job their wife is left with because raising kids with a dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm is brutal.
I think the notion that's being challenged is that a college degree is an automatic way out of "dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm", no matter what the degree is for and who is getting the degree; or that being credentialed and unemployed is better than that.
Anyone have the stats for how the enrollment trends have been for CS programs at universities? Has there been a noticeable drop-off, potentially due to concerns of AI reducing/eliminating entry-level/junior roles? I suppose there would be some lag, since if you've been planning most of your high school career to get a CS degree, there is inertia in changing majors and applying to different universities. And now that we're mid-April, I'd even think the data for the incoming freshman would be pretty close at a 90% confidence level for the upcoming 2026/2027 academic year.
"In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease."
But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025:
"U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%"
I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists.
IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago."
CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos.
Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend.
Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.
Internet universities have been available for several decades; correspondence degrees for almost a century. Sure, credentialing is a large part of students' choices to attend in-person. Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is because most people learn best in-person, with personal interaction.
I would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves.
> Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is
the parties, the co-eds, and the start of life from outside the direct supervision of parental units. Let's be honest, all of this education stuff is secondary to that.
This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by watching 1980s college movies, not someone who looked at data. Community colleges, vocational schools, and commuter students represent a large proportion of college students, and are removed from the Animal House experience.
The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life.
One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
> The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life.
Let's observe revealed preferences, not stated ones.
> One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
This is a small fraction of the total college population.
Most people in college are only there because it's the default next step after high school. In fact, a lot of people in graduate school are only there because it's the default next step after a bachelor's degree.
> Most people in college are only there because it's the default next step after high school. In fact, a lot of people in graduate school are only there because it's the default next step after a bachelor's degree.
This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by not having an honest conversation about the subject. It is entirely possible that one can attend classes while attending various parties on the weekend or even various events at night after classes. Your knee jerk reaction to my comment that everything is going to be Animal House, Porky's, or Revenge of the Nerds level of shenanigans says more about you.
You still haven't presented any data or even rebutted my claims. Just the banal observation that students periodically attend social events coupled with a mild insult. There are better websites for your preferred type of social media experience.
“ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors.
I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free.
Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.
I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book.
Magical times.”
> CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone?
That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.
Yup. I've also seen a number like that mentioned by the Moonshots podcast by peter diamantis.. they showed that quarter by quarter the placement rate for CS grads had declined every querter for the last 3 years from 93% at 91K per year down to 19% at about 65k. it was one of their last podcasts from about a week ago.
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities and equipment.
One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today.
This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers
and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms.
I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do.
For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.
Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
Nearly half of college graduates age 22-27 are underemployed (i.e. such that bachelors degrees have jobs that only require a high school diploma or less):
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
> all of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
Edit: apologies, I just noticed my original comment said "all" instead of "many". That definitely isn't case as you noted.
Original:
Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
To my own discredit, I do often forget the S in STEM ;-). Thank you for improving the completeness of my knowledge with data.
I've long been under the impression (might be quite wrong, of course) that a number of science fields suffer from a problem where bachelor's degrees have very little practical value because the career expectation in the field is a graduate degree.
This is probably bias on my part since my most direct exposure to the phenomenon is a couple of my extended family members who got degrees in biology but then exited higher education. They can't get jobs in biology, they are stuck working jobs that would have been just as attainable right out of high school.
Wouldn't it also mean, that while ⅕ of CS grads initially work as support (for example), the people with just the education needed for that (vocational school) didn't get that job, because it went to someone with a better degree?
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
Not necessarily. Many employers who don't require a college degree can be reluctant to hire someone who is "over qualified" because they are more likely to quit as soon as they get a better job, and they are more likely to keep looking for one.
With that said, there's also a lot of jobs that list a college degree as a requirement that absolutely don't need one whatsoever. I suspect this is largely to cut down on the number of applicants.
Back when applications were done on paper, I recall turning one in to a prospective employer, who set it on a stack of paper around 15cm tall, which just so happened to be right next to a trash can. Now that you can apply to 50 jobs in an hour because job application sites basically pre-fill applications for you, it's insane what hiring is like in any city bigger than a small town.
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
In the US there've historically been great work and wealth-generating opportunities that weren't as readily available in Europe. That seems to come at the price of less safety net if something goes wrong e:g health problems, disability, job loss. In recent times Europe has become more like the US in the sense of cutting safety nets while being more entrepreneurial. I think this'll lead to less people choosing to move to the US from Europe, compounded by US now having possibly less opportunities and an administration that makes even well qualified legal immigrants feel unsafe. Which will become self-fulfilling, the opportunities of the future will increasingly be outside the US. As to why more Americans haven't historically moved to Europe, my guess would be its simply unawareness of how actually for a lot of people it'd give a better quality of life.
University is too expensive, bloating administrative budgets and "prestige" architecture combined with professional sports teams have led everyone astray from the two goals: advancing the forefront of human knowledge and preparing young people with the education to be free in their world.
Instead we're going to very expensive camp where most of the people flaunt laws for fun (there's no reason alcohol should be illegal for undergrads) and then grind to pass tests while not actually learning all that much OR becoming all that prepared for the world after university.
Particularly with how poorly academics are paid, it would be pretty damn easy to build a better university.
It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
If you are choosing to still attend college, my advice would be to get an A.B.E.T-accredited degree, to fall back upon (I have a non-BE science degree from a prestigious US institution == essentially worthless).
Being an engineer vs. being an engineer tech is a substantially life-quality difference.
But only if you choose to attend (I would not re-attend).
Necessary but not sufficient: My aerospace engineering degree is from an ABET-certified school. However, I skipped the class (and test) that puts you onto the track of being able to call yourself a professional engineer.
I would also suggest looking at the ABET certification interval for different campuses. It was a point of pride on our campus that we had a longer interval compared to the more established campus. We got the longer interval because ABET trusted our program to not need constant supervision.
Exactly. Most 4-year engineering programs are accredited (but definitely not all).
Rougly speaking, it cuts the professional experience requirement in half, and makes the entire process of becoming a P.E. (professional engineer) much simpler (not easier).
There are multiple field tests, including the Fundamentals & Engineering exam that allows you to 2x your eng.tech. experience.
It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction. College expenses have been subject to cost disease for years and a reckoning is long due. I’m not sure if demographic change will produce this reckoning but something has to.
You just have to fire 80% of the administration, kill all of the "programs" which are trying to do this or that, and focus on A) providing the basic resources for academics to study and B) providing the basic resources for teaching.
Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The president of a university should have the pay and prestige that goes along with administering the parking garage and cafeteria and have few responsibilities or accolades beyond that.
If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.
Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:
I wouldn't think so. Hospitals do some teaching and research, but they also administer huge amounts of prescription drugs, physician salaries (both teaching and non-teaching), durable medical equipment, supplies, marketing, home health services, etc.
But then how will the NFL run it's free feeder and athlete development program?
How will Disney get to profit off of selling college athletes as an entertainment product?
If college is accessible to even the poorest Americans, how will we maintain the claim that they are bastions of liberal brainwashing against millions of conservative people getting reasonable educations in basic things like "Political Science" that don't actually force them to become communists at all?
Who will ensure that only those who "Deserve" it can afford to get a degree through byzantine FAFSA workflows and departments? Who will ensure that being middle class means you have to pay out of pocket instead of getting a couple thousand dollars?!
My most effective professors gave us the answers to the work we were expected to do. It was a much more effective way to learn than doing work and getting feedback to whether or not it was correct weeks later. Organizing academic work in such a way that "cheating" is even a concept is silly. You're there to learn, if you want to pretend that you learned I guess good for you but we need to just get over the fact that people can make it look like they did something when they didn't.
Universities got broken trying to make it for everyone, and also jacked up the price. Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
I met someone who received a degree in "Happiness" from a reputable university and took a hodge podge of courses. There are also many inter-disciplinary degrees that make sense at a graduate degree level but not an undergraduate level.
> Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
But who is gonna pay for these? (half-/s)
Reality is, employers don't want to pay the bill for job training centers or for German-style apprenticeship education. Universities aka degree mills are what keeps most large employers afloat - depending on the system, it's either the talent themselves (US via student loans), the government itself (Germany) or a mixture of both paying the bills, while employers get fresh trained talent without paying a dime.
That's really the key problem facing US universities, from land-grant colleges to the Ivies: everyone depends at least in part on closing budgetary gaps with global students who pay full freight. Current Administration policies, both specifically targeted at foreign students and more generally at higher education and immigration, are poisoning the seed corn colleges and universities rely on. The only good news, relatively speaking, is that Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States, which means that America and our higher education system can recover from this, should we have the fortitude to do so in the future -- there just isn't much in the way of competition.
> Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States
Perhaps you're already implying this, but for Europe to drain intellectual capital from the US, it would have to offer a hell of a lot more than cheap college for foreign students.
Those are not global students. Those are people who are already living in the state. Foreign students typically pay the most tuition possible with no financial aid, subsidizing everyone else.
so all those foreign students could become "not foreign" by merely coming here for a tourist visit and overstaying? Quite the idea. I will suggest to a few college-age friends to claim to be illegal. Why pay more when you can pay less? Plus, there is no way to verify a LACK of citizenship or of SSN.
IMO we should pay adults to go back to school. Make all public universities free and pay a living stipend. Give additional stipends for dependents. Easy win for everyone.
It’s good for society. You get a more educated population, you get to redistribute wealth (reduce GINI is always a win), you get increased per capita productivity as people expand their skills.
Students in America don't have jobs. You can be motherfucking Einstein but you will still have to be a waiter in a cafe to contribute to society and pay for your student room.
As long as people are allowed to vote in the US, we have an incentive to ensure they are all well educated.
Surely a large part of this problem that the article doesn't mention is that college is too fucking expensive. And an obvious solution to that is to tax rich people and use that to fund universities so that students don't have to go so far in debt in order to become productive members of society.
It's crazy how many problems today boil down to "a tiny fraction of elites are hoarding all the wealth" and yet we seem to assume the solution of "tax them and use that money to benefit others" is simply impossible.
But if we care about people being educated enough to vote, a high school education is enough. Or at least, what high school was 50 years ago was enough.
If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.
The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. The tough pill to swallow, if we are to follow in e.g. Sweden's footsteps, is that you need to tax the middle class a lot more if you want the government to provide more services.
By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio and switching to Whole Foods when we're not even on pace to pay off the house??
> The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso.
I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument.
My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
Some amount of inequality is healthy. The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
> By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE.
Good point! It would be really great if the government wasn't funneling billions into the coffers of defense companies by starting nonsense wars.
Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations and going into greater debt for it is a two-handed gift to the rich: they pay less taxes and they make money directly from the government by being paid interest when they loan money to the government.
> I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument
Do you only ingest ideas from places that you're already inclined to believe? How do you get challenges to your beliefs?
> is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
> Some amount of inequality is healthy.
What amount of inequality is just right, then? On one hand you suggest that we should redistribute to lower inequality, but on the other you seem to see some kind of beneficial role, or at least a neutral role, of inequality in a society.
> The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
Countries as diverse as Sweden, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have worse inequality in wealth than the US[0]. On the other end, countries like Iceland, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan have similarly low wealth inequality. I might posit that wealth inequality doesn't even make the top 10 of what makes a health society that's nice to live in.
I shouldn't have to tell you that "but it's a conservative think tank" is merely ad hominem. If you think Jessica Riedl is misrepresenting the facts, I and many others would appreciate your elaborating. I'm afraid you haven't even read it.
Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.
I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.
You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.
Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." Inexpensive tertiary education means that more people go through the motions of being educated, à la high school, for an additional four years because "that's what they're supposed to do" and then emerge none the better for it.
A system of heavily subsidized post-secondary vocational schools, like what Germany has, seems like a better path.
> One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination
This is pretty silly. Any amount of new knowledge tends to make the brain more critical. The only real exception is rote memorization without application.
The author has written a famous book on college admissions, but this piece doesn't really seem to add much to the discussion. I came away thinking that his publicist recommended he get his name out there more to help his brand or sell some more books.
More people read the Atlantic than read books on college admissions. It is possible and often useful to increase the number of informed people even without adding net new information.
I don't think the book that he's famous for talks about the demographic trends much at all. It's just something that parents are aware of, and that is talked about as one of the ways in which admissions numbers will change in the next decade or two.
> On the flip side, perhaps no field has collapsed more dramatically than computer and information sciences: From 2014 to 2024, entry-level openings grew about 6%, while the number of graduates soared by 110%.
That seems more relevant to new CS grad unemployment than AI.
Well this has been essentially the plan since the 70's. The 60's scared the bejeezus out of the ruling class and they began taking steps to bring the people to heel from the 70's onward. In the words of Ronald Reagan's education advisor, Roger Freeman: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
In the mid 90's, my affluent suburban high school was in panic mode, afraid that declining enrollment was an impending death spiral. My graduating class only had gasp 750+ students. Ten years after I graduated, entering the 2000's, enrollment had already surpassed 800 kids. The school had to build out an entire wing and completely remodel the athletic building to accomodate all the new students that were enrolling.
Likewise, attending college in North Dakota saw the same thing in the late 90's. Sheer panic the entire North Dakota college system was about to enter an enrollment desert. They wondered how can the Universities recruit more out-state students. Again, by early to mid aughts? Enrollment was off the charts. They had to buy buildings in the downtown area and convert them to a new "downtown campus" for several emerging and expanding majors. The campus saw a constant upgrade of facilities and buildings. It was completely the opposite. The entire system saw a massive transformation that continues to this day:
As of Fall 2025, the North Dakota University System (NDUS) reports a total headcount of 47,552 students, marking a 3.8% increase over 2024 and reaching its highest level since 2014. The University of North Dakota (UND) specifically achieved a record-breaking enrollment of 15,844 students in 2025, surpassing its previous 2012 record. Across the system, growth is driven by rising undergraduate numbers and an increase in high school students.
Over the past five or so years, there's been a small fluctuation, but overall the system has been surging as of late and is on solid ground for the next decade or so.
The North Dakota system is the very kind of system the article says is about to be greatly affected by the year 2040. That would require quite a drop off from where they currently are and the amount of growth they're having right now.
Again, I don't buy this since many of the people who are from out-state, many of them will settle down in North Dakota cities, get married and start families there. The cost of living is super low and its a very tax friendly state compared to many of its neighbors like Minnesota. Fargo, where NDSU (and by proxy Moorehead University and Concordia College) is located is still one of the fastest growing cities in the state, growing steadily at about a 2% pace annually. Which means the supply side of the equation isn't likely to die out any time either.
From my youth, I was infected with the desire to graduate college at all costs. I was adopted, and I was told that both of my birth-parents were college graduates (I later validated this as truth!) My adoptive parents were also both college graduates, though my mother chose against a career or employment in favor of motherhood, and active volunteering in church and civic spheres.
My sister and I were both groomed to go to college. We attended the standard college prep high schools. The choices were laid before us. Mom told me definitely not to attend UC Berkeley (because of the hippies and anti-war protests.) So, I chose UCSD and my parents basically handled all the paperwork; I sat down to write an essay, and I was totally in.
However, mental illness ruled my life and I dropped out of classes. An excuse by my therapist got me restarted but not for very long before the second dropout. I tried community college for a semester and earned one more good grade (in C programming). I started work, foolishly believing that would go better than college! My life fell apart around me and college remained unfinished for decades.
Finally by 2017 I was stable enough to consider college again. Of course I should have understood that my career was not a thing, and at that point, college was the frivolous pipe-dream of an aging guy unable to really support himself. Nonetheless, I did the FAFSA, and Uncle Sam paid for the rest of my college bills.
I again dropped out, for reasons of being less-than-stable, but I had managed to earn 3 CompTIA certifications and I also landed a very nice job, which I held for over 4 years. None of those would've been possible without the drive to finish college.
Ultimately, the community college found a way to "graduate me" and award me a certificate of completion (instead of the Associate's in Applied Science which I was pursuing.) My "graduation ceremony" occurred in the US Postal Service station. Receiving that certificate was 100% a surprise, but a Pyrrhic victory.
At this point, I achieved my "bucket list" of graduating college, but I have 0 career prospects, and the certificate means 0 to my former or prospective employers (the certifications also meant nothing to them!)
So what did Uncle Sam really pay for? My personal satisfaction? Just to funnel more taxpayer money to the college system? I am fine with that, I suppose.
But it just goes to show that far more families push their children to attend college, and the expectations are set too high, when many kids growing up really need some vocational skills and real-life street smarts to survive in this world. Tuition prices have been jacked-up absurdly by the proliferation of scholarships and grants. "Diversity" means any view except conservatives or Christians. We are in need of a reckoning, especially for land-grant and "Ivy League" institutions.
Unless the big universities “expand” by linking up with the regional colleges, giving them a branding cachet that will attract students, there is one group that will benefit enormously:
Conservatives.
They require an uneducated and ignorant electorate. It’s the only way they can hoodwink voters into voting against their own best interests.
I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen.
Against this backdrop, there was no world in which the price of higher education wasn't going to go dramatically up.
College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities:
My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
CPI component calculations done by the BLS shows "College tuition and fees", including adjustments for scholarships and grants, had a 63% increase from 2009 (to match the CB data baseline) to now, which outpaces overall inflation of 56% over the same timeframe. I'm not sure what methodology CB uses to show falling inflation-adjusted prices.
Granted, it's not a massive difference in those percentages[0], but because college is a large single-ticket item, that difference is probably felt more acutely.
> Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities
In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
[0]: As an aside, it's incredible that everyone half of their purchasing power in ~15 years, and a quarter in just the past 5 years alone.
> My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
That's true, but as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
I think we largely agree overall, the CPI numbers are close enough that I wouldn't dispute them; they align with my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices.
> In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
This is probably true, and campuses could run housing at less-than-market rates. Whether that would be a better model than just giving students more financial aid that then gets paid back to the University as rent is something we'd have to model. Either way, my point is that we've seen a significant increase in the cost of rent across the entire country in the post-COVID era. That makes the Cost of College seem higher, but is something that Universities are subject to as much as a cause of.
> as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.
> my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices
That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
> Under simplifying assumptions, including competitive labor markets, no direct schooling costs, and constant proportional returns, this specification yields an interpretable estimate of the average percentage increase in earnings associated with an additional year of schooling.
So, an individual student will be expected to have higher earnings with more schooling. But as a matter of public policy that involves taxpayer funding of higher education, I cannot accurately base those decisions on a methodology that assumes a cost of zero ("no direct schooling costs").
Your source also identifies that higher marginal returns are found in lower-income, lower-educated countries, which makes sense. How much marginal return (for the taxpayer dollar) can we expect in a high-income country with a service-based economy and a third of the population already having a bachelor's degree?
Right in the headline is a word choice I've notice lately that irks me, "democratization".
"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. In voting, "more access" means "more governing power" (in principle), but in other things, it does not.
If you want to use "democratized" applied to higher-ed, it would mean more people are involved in the decision-making, leadership, or ownership.
>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it.
> I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
People have been using "democratize" to describe "more accessible to the masses" for a long time. Here's an example from 106 years ago in 1920 :
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Soviet_Russia/qflaAAAAM...
And 40 years ago a 1986 article of "microchip democratizing computing" : https://www.google.com/books/edition/Procom_s_1986_1987_Dent...
The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are also documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
It could be that HN commnter replying to submission about education in the United States indicating that he is "irked" by the term "democratisation" is not located within the United States but rather in a non-English speaking country not initiallu founded upon "democratic" principles (cf. United States) and with a dissimilar history of "democracy". As such, his interpetation of this term could have different meaning to him than the journalist working for The Atlantic who resides within the United States and is employed by one of its academic institutions
Indeed. Like ks2048 I find the use of "democratize" outisde of governance to be bizzare and even annoying.
I am British by birth, and IIRC Hacker News is pretty much the only place I see "democratize" used to mean "make more widely available".
*initially
Right. But it's not my favorite nerd snipe interpretation that allows me to post low effort comments on hackernews about the headline instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion about the article.
I basically agree, but I think at this point it's an accepted use; see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_knowledge> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_technology>. Indeed, wiktionary (<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratization>) uses your sense as the first, strict definition, but gives "The broadening of access to something, especially for the sake of egalitarianism." as the loose definition.
"Democratize"? I thought that was when you rent an AI tool built on stolen intellectual property to write, draw, code, etc. for you because you never bothered to learn those skills yourself and convinced yourself they were being gatekept.
>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it
It literally does, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic
3: relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people
I do not know how it worked in the US but in my country until the 1960s university was for the upper class.
No son or daughter of a butcher could ever hope to study law.
It really changed during the Clinton administration, where rules were established for student loans that pretty much ensured almost anyone who wanted to go to college could go to college. Since then tuition rates have dramatically exceeded inflation though. There's also the issue in that a lot of private/commercial colleges have optimized their pricing to where most people drop out to extract maximum value from the system, pretty much leaving people often unable to complete their programs the final year or half year.
I think that the opportunity for funding should have higher ties to economic demand for certain degree programs over others. I'm not opposed to people that want to go to arts programs in college, but I'm not sure that they should be taxpayer funded necessarily.
I have thought that areas where we bring in foreign workers should largely be offset with higher employer taxes and those taxes funding grants for domestic study into the fields in question. I also think we need a much broader set of trade schools for more industries than typical. Even with technology and programming.
In terms of lower high school graduation rates, I think we've dumbed down and taken things to the lowest common denominator in an extreme fashion. Common-core has failed, along with "new math" and other more modern teaching methods. My great grandmother was a teacher, and I've seen some of the text books they used in the pre-1960s, the coverage was much more thorough and difficult even at a 5th grade level than what many kids today see through the end of high school.
There should be plenty of room for vocational study as well as traditional study... but we need to stop just giving kids a pass because they're a certain age when they don't understand the core curriculem.
It might have been the same until 1960s in the US. It doesn't matter in 2020s, when people who graduated before 1960s are in their 80s if still alive.
Isn't more people attending college, and thus choosing where to go with their pocket book, the 'control'.
The people control, through voting by choosing where to attend, based on what is offered. So if someplace is not offering much that anybody wants, they don't get students, and go out of business.
The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
Not that I agree that money should control learning. I'd like to go back to more hardcore reading/writing/arithmetic/Compiler Design. But nobody digs that.
> The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
I guess I'm saying, yes, that is how it often used. I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
In the 90's when Linux was taking off, did people say Torvalds has "democratized Unix"? (honest question - I'm not sure.)
It's a fairly weak level of control, though.
Compare with the governing structures of public universities in (most of?) Germany where there is a "senate" composed of elected representatives of professors, students, and administrative and academic staff. Now that is approaching democratic control.
Just wait until you realize that 99.999% of the time, when people say "methodology" they really mean "method". It'll drive you mad.
I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years).
I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate.
There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.
Jee I wish OP would have linked the source instead of just… alluding to it and promising that it’s reliable.
“… a site I read…” Lol
In 2024 is 74%, not 11%
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
That is, 7% are unemployed, and 19% aren't able to find comp sci jobs.
I suspect it's worse now, but probably not 11%?
[dead]
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate
That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market.
E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
I'd interpret that as 11% of CS grads are finding appropriate jobs (not underemployment) within a set amount of time after graduation. That data from the fed includes all people aged 22-27 with a bachelor's degree.
Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
That's the way I interpreted it, too. A CS grad working at Home Depot stocking shelves or an accounting grad working at Starbucks would not count toward unemployment figures, but it's probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate.
Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
> probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate
Agreed, but wouldn't that be captured as 'under employment'? The stats are there for that, too, seems to be close to 20%.
Yea, I'd call that underemployed. Does that mean 80% of recent college grads are employed in their area of study? I would be shocked if that were true.
Underemployment in the Fed’s data is defined as working any job where at least 50% of people in the job field say you don’t need a college degree. So 80% of recent grads are working in jobs where the perception is you need a degree. Which with the insane requirements for entry level jobs could still be underemployment from a practical perspective
It means that they are employed in a position that requires a college degree.
The census data you linked lists unemployment and underemployment for graduates aged 22-27. Assuming nontraditional graduates are a relatively small minority, that's a 5 year window after graduation.
I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
defunding education systems strikes again
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong.
In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.
The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:
> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas.
College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.
We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM.
A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
Lots of things benefit society and don't cost $40k per year per person in subsidies - mainly to the upper middle class.
Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees, both of which are considerably more expensive.
Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
> mortgage interest deduction
By far the worst offender.
> health care for wealthy retirees
Theoretically, they paid into the system to get their dues.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
There's evidence at the State level, at least in many states, it does not pay for itself.
Then at the very least college debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy the way people can walk away from their mortgage.
Agreed. The idiotic law not allowing college debt to be cleared by bankruptcy is the primary reason why college has gotten so expensive.
Then treat college debt like any other loan instead of subsidies backstopped with government bailouts.
> Strange how I never see this line deployed against the mortgage interest deduction or health care for wealthy retirees
For what it's worth, I see arguments like this all the time. Might just be the corner of the information ecosystem you hang out in.
> Subsidizing college education, at least, has a reliably positive ROI.
Maybe it did in the past, where the greatest marginal gains were. Does it still hold true now? Over a third of the US has a bachelor's degree. Is there a reliably positive ROI to society in taking that third to, say, half?
> Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all
> A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements
I don't believe those strong assertions you're making were uncontroversial at any time, and are likely objectively less true now than they were in the past.
You're both right. College is beneficial to society. And it costs way too much to deliver right now.
You could copy-paste these statements to describe American healthcare vs European healthcare and get a very different reaction. Even though it's true for that field too.
Why the actual fuck does a humanities degree cost anywhere near as much as an engineering degree? Literally all you need is some professors and a space to teach in. You could run them in co-working spaces, parks (weather permitting), or coffee shops ffs, with no administrative staff or other bloat. (For real: small seminars in a coffee shop or a public park would be dope)
Education is beneficial to society and making it cheaper makes it more widely accessible. You and the person you responded to actually agree on a lot.
There have been several attempts to raise the bar for Community Colleges to offer Bachelors programs... the existing universities and entrenched professional programs have fought it tooth and nail.
My daughter got her associates carrying no debt... but has struggled to get into an appropriate higher level program. She's currently working PT in two jobs, one as a prep cook in a high end eatery and as a park associate at the local zoo. Neither is offering a particularly compelling pay or benefits that most jobs should offer IMO.
I'm with you on college though, in terms of there should be way cheaper options all around... I think there should even be grant programs for better vocational/trade programs as an alternative path for Bachelors class degrees.
Waterloo University sort of nails the balance with their focus on constant, paid internships.
So community colleges?
God I wish community college would be subsidized. Some states now cover it for your first degree which is a great start and some also are now starting to subsidize courses for retirees but man I would so love to just go and do like random courses I have no intention of pursuing a career in.
European universities are not resorts like in the US and community college keep that small footprint mentality as well. They have done it right. Focus on the education and keep costs lower. I have friends in Europe that work for a few years then just take time off and study something that interests them in their subsidized universities and I am so jealous because their costs are so low.
When I went to community college (and then university) there were a few moments where I actually wasn't treading water in my CS degree and I was able to take a wide variety of classes. They were some of the happiest moments of my life.
Recently visited LA and walked around LACC during the evening. The campus is enormous (and famously was the scene for the TV show Community). I just thought of the enormous variety of subjects being taught, imagine if that was accessible to anyone when they desired.
They are! The State of California contributes the following to the system: -- Total CCC Funding Is $20 Billion in 2026-27 Under Governor’s Budget.
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2026/5150/2026-27_CCC_030506.pdf
Isn't LACC subsidized ($46/unit resident tuition seems pretty good)?
Yes just rechecked and you are right. I am not a CA native (was just visiting LA) and so happy to see that this is available. I originally thought they just subsidized degrees for only "first degree" seeking students. Maybe I need to move to LA. My local CC is $225 per credit for in state residents.
That's absolutely not the point of higher education, don't drag it down to the level of industry please.
I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this.
Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay.
I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone?
This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that.
Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share
In 2024, 42.8% of the population ages 25 to 39, 41.5% ages 40 to 54, and 34.2% age 55 and older held a bachelor’s degree or higher.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/educatio...
That does not seem like everyone is going to college.
"Everyone" is hyperbole, of course. But it's already too high a number.
When I graduated in the early 2010s I recall the number was closer to ~35%. Honestly given the economy today and the expectations of employers of having a college degree for even basic stuff, these numbers seem pretty low.
In Europe only about 43% have a college degree. So even with heavily subsidized schools there is really only a certain percentage of people that take this path.
[1]:https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
> the expectations of employers of having a college degree for even basic stuff
This is mostly an unintentional side-effect of civil rights law, stemming from Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
Well yeah, trades suck ass. There are alot of dudes in cushy well paid office gigs extolling the virtues of trade work.
It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
And a bunch of tech peeps are overweight physically out of shape with other health effects as bad as what you're saying about trades. Humans get old.
I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
Im not denigrating anyone. I worked dairy farms from age 7 to 23.
It’s a brutal lifestyle and I’ve seen my share of hardworking, broken 50 year olds trying to make it mostly on the lesser paying job their wife is left with because raising kids with a dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm is brutal.
I think the notion that's being challenged is that a college degree is an automatic way out of "dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm", no matter what the degree is for and who is getting the degree; or that being credentialed and unemployed is better than that.
Quick search shows around 6% unemployment for CS grads. Where is your number from? That is massively different.
Anyone have the stats for how the enrollment trends have been for CS programs at universities? Has there been a noticeable drop-off, potentially due to concerns of AI reducing/eliminating entry-level/junior roles? I suppose there would be some lag, since if you've been planning most of your high school career to get a CS degree, there is inertia in changing majors and applying to different universities. And now that we're mid-April, I'd even think the data for the incoming freshman would be pretty close at a 90% confidence level for the upcoming 2026/2027 academic year.
Check out the Taulbee survey results:
"In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease."
But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025:
"U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%"
I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists.
IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago."
CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos.
Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend.
Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.
Internet universities have been available for several decades; correspondence degrees for almost a century. Sure, credentialing is a large part of students' choices to attend in-person. Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is because most people learn best in-person, with personal interaction.
I would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves.
1. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
> Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is
the parties, the co-eds, and the start of life from outside the direct supervision of parental units. Let's be honest, all of this education stuff is secondary to that.
This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by watching 1980s college movies, not someone who looked at data. Community colleges, vocational schools, and commuter students represent a large proportion of college students, and are removed from the Animal House experience.
The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life.
One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
> The primary goal for attending college, as stated by both students and parents, is for preparation for entrance into the workforce and adult life.
Let's observe revealed preferences, not stated ones.
> One can go to the engineering or computer science building in almost any U.S. or Canadian university and observe a student population that doesn't party on a regular basis.
This is a small fraction of the total college population.
Most people in college are only there because it's the default next step after high school. In fact, a lot of people in graduate school are only there because it's the default next step after a bachelor's degree.
> Most people in college are only there because it's the default next step after high school. In fact, a lot of people in graduate school are only there because it's the default next step after a bachelor's degree.
Exactly! Not because of parties!
This seems like the conclusion someone would come to by not having an honest conversation about the subject. It is entirely possible that one can attend classes while attending various parties on the weekend or even various events at night after classes. Your knee jerk reaction to my comment that everything is going to be Animal House, Porky's, or Revenge of the Nerds level of shenanigans says more about you.
You still haven't presented any data or even rebutted my claims. Just the banal observation that students periodically attend social events coupled with a mild insult. There are better websites for your preferred type of social media experience.
I said this a week ago, and it swung in votes like crazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525
“ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free. Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.
I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book. Magical times.”
let's see the site, if we can't have a primary source
> CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone?
That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.
Yup. I've also seen a number like that mentioned by the Moonshots podcast by peter diamantis.. they showed that quarter by quarter the placement rate for CS grads had declined every querter for the last 3 years from 93% at 91K per year down to 19% at about 65k. it was one of their last podcasts from about a week ago.
> I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years
What's the secondary source then?
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education.
This is the only real answer.
If college is considered a glorified high school diploma, then not having one is like not having a high school diploma.
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities and equipment.
One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today.
This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Ne...
and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms.
I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do.
For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.
Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
Nearly half of college graduates age 22-27 are underemployed (i.e. such that bachelors degrees have jobs that only require a high school diploma or less):
https://archive.is/wrDde
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
> all of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
Edit: apologies, I just noticed my original comment said "all" instead of "many". That definitely isn't case as you noted.
Original: Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
To my own discredit, I do often forget the S in STEM ;-). Thank you for improving the completeness of my knowledge with data.
I've long been under the impression (might be quite wrong, of course) that a number of science fields suffer from a problem where bachelor's degrees have very little practical value because the career expectation in the field is a graduate degree.
This is probably bias on my part since my most direct exposure to the phenomenon is a couple of my extended family members who got degrees in biology but then exited higher education. They can't get jobs in biology, they are stuck working jobs that would have been just as attainable right out of high school.
Wouldn't it also mean, that while ⅕ of CS grads initially work as support (for example), the people with just the education needed for that (vocational school) didn't get that job, because it went to someone with a better degree?
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
Not necessarily. Many employers who don't require a college degree can be reluctant to hire someone who is "over qualified" because they are more likely to quit as soon as they get a better job, and they are more likely to keep looking for one.
With that said, there's also a lot of jobs that list a college degree as a requirement that absolutely don't need one whatsoever. I suspect this is largely to cut down on the number of applicants.
Back when applications were done on paper, I recall turning one in to a prospective employer, who set it on a stack of paper around 15cm tall, which just so happened to be right next to a trash can. Now that you can apply to 50 jobs in an hour because job application sites basically pre-fill applications for you, it's insane what hiring is like in any city bigger than a small town.
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
> which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones
Funny how despite all that, more people choose to come to the US from those "mature" societies than the other way around.
In the US there've historically been great work and wealth-generating opportunities that weren't as readily available in Europe. That seems to come at the price of less safety net if something goes wrong e:g health problems, disability, job loss. In recent times Europe has become more like the US in the sense of cutting safety nets while being more entrepreneurial. I think this'll lead to less people choosing to move to the US from Europe, compounded by US now having possibly less opportunities and an administration that makes even well qualified legal immigrants feel unsafe. Which will become self-fulfilling, the opportunities of the future will increasingly be outside the US. As to why more Americans haven't historically moved to Europe, my guess would be its simply unawareness of how actually for a lot of people it'd give a better quality of life.
It’s not a blind roll of the dice, then. Among other factors that make it pretty different.
Some colleges seem to be glorified sports teams that happen to have a school attached.
A lot of others are real estate companies that happen to have a school attached.
University is too expensive, bloating administrative budgets and "prestige" architecture combined with professional sports teams have led everyone astray from the two goals: advancing the forefront of human knowledge and preparing young people with the education to be free in their world.
Instead we're going to very expensive camp where most of the people flaunt laws for fun (there's no reason alcohol should be illegal for undergrads) and then grind to pass tests while not actually learning all that much OR becoming all that prepared for the world after university.
Particularly with how poorly academics are paid, it would be pretty damn easy to build a better university.
It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
> It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
The vast majority of college degrees are nowhere near that. Average in-state tuition in the US is something like $9,000.
Now, some people want a trophy from Stanford, but that's a separate topic.
https://archive.ph/KpOsf
If you are choosing to still attend college, my advice would be to get an A.B.E.T-accredited degree, to fall back upon (I have a non-BE science degree from a prestigious US institution == essentially worthless).
Being an engineer vs. being an engineer tech is a substantially life-quality difference.
But only if you choose to attend (I would not re-attend).
Is this related to the exam that some college graduates could take to become professional engineers?
Necessary but not sufficient: My aerospace engineering degree is from an ABET-certified school. However, I skipped the class (and test) that puts you onto the track of being able to call yourself a professional engineer.
I would also suggest looking at the ABET certification interval for different campuses. It was a point of pride on our campus that we had a longer interval compared to the more established campus. We got the longer interval because ABET trusted our program to not need constant supervision.
Exactly. Most 4-year engineering programs are accredited (but definitely not all).
Rougly speaking, it cuts the professional experience requirement in half, and makes the entire process of becoming a P.E. (professional engineer) much simpler (not easier).
There are multiple field tests, including the Fundamentals & Engineering exam that allows you to 2x your eng.tech. experience.
It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction. College expenses have been subject to cost disease for years and a reckoning is long due. I’m not sure if demographic change will produce this reckoning but something has to.
You just have to fire 80% of the administration, kill all of the "programs" which are trying to do this or that, and focus on A) providing the basic resources for academics to study and B) providing the basic resources for teaching.
Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The president of a university should have the pay and prestige that goes along with administering the parking garage and cafeteria and have few responsibilities or accolades beyond that.
If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.
Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...
Those are under the umbrella of research and teaching no?
I wouldn't think so. Hospitals do some teaching and research, but they also administer huge amounts of prescription drugs, physician salaries (both teaching and non-teaching), durable medical equipment, supplies, marketing, home health services, etc.
But then how will the NFL run it's free feeder and athlete development program?
How will Disney get to profit off of selling college athletes as an entertainment product?
If college is accessible to even the poorest Americans, how will we maintain the claim that they are bastions of liberal brainwashing against millions of conservative people getting reasonable educations in basic things like "Political Science" that don't actually force them to become communists at all?
Who will ensure that only those who "Deserve" it can afford to get a degree through byzantine FAFSA workflows and departments? Who will ensure that being middle class means you have to pay out of pocket instead of getting a couple thousand dollars?!
College football is very profitable. What will go away is all the other sports.
"It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction."
There is a substantial collection of things that share this need.
There are only two businesses ChatGPT has really disrupted: Chegg and customer service.
There's disruption but not the good kind. The reckoning is cheating not demographics.
My most effective professors gave us the answers to the work we were expected to do. It was a much more effective way to learn than doing work and getting feedback to whether or not it was correct weeks later. Organizing academic work in such a way that "cheating" is even a concept is silly. You're there to learn, if you want to pretend that you learned I guess good for you but we need to just get over the fact that people can make it look like they did something when they didn't.
Universities got broken trying to make it for everyone, and also jacked up the price. Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
What is a "boutique major"?
I met someone who received a degree in "Happiness" from a reputable university and took a hodge podge of courses. There are also many inter-disciplinary degrees that make sense at a graduate degree level but not an undergraduate level.
> Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
But who is gonna pay for these? (half-/s)
Reality is, employers don't want to pay the bill for job training centers or for German-style apprenticeship education. Universities aka degree mills are what keeps most large employers afloat - depending on the system, it's either the talent themselves (US via student loans), the government itself (Germany) or a mixture of both paying the bills, while employers get fresh trained talent without paying a dime.
> The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year.
The article doesn't seem to mention foreigners - particularly Chinese. Are those numbers expected to grow or shrink?
Under the current admin's policies shrink. After that who knows.
That's really the key problem facing US universities, from land-grant colleges to the Ivies: everyone depends at least in part on closing budgetary gaps with global students who pay full freight. Current Administration policies, both specifically targeted at foreign students and more generally at higher education and immigration, are poisoning the seed corn colleges and universities rely on. The only good news, relatively speaking, is that Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States, which means that America and our higher education system can recover from this, should we have the fortitude to do so in the future -- there just isn't much in the way of competition.
> Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States
Perhaps you're already implying this, but for Europe to drain intellectual capital from the US, it would have to offer a hell of a lot more than cheap college for foreign students.
> with global students who pay full freight
Some do, some pay nothing: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2023/05/31/minnesota...
Those are not global students. Those are people who are already living in the state. Foreign students typically pay the most tuition possible with no financial aid, subsidizing everyone else.
so all those foreign students could become "not foreign" by merely coming here for a tourist visit and overstaying? Quite the idea. I will suggest to a few college-age friends to claim to be illegal. Why pay more when you can pay less? Plus, there is no way to verify a LACK of citizenship or of SSN.
IMO we should pay adults to go back to school. Make all public universities free and pay a living stipend. Give additional stipends for dependents. Easy win for everyone.
American universities need to become more like their European counterparts in order for this model to work.
Insert "just need to subsidize demand" meme here.
That's how we got here
but why
It’s good for society. You get a more educated population, you get to redistribute wealth (reduce GINI is always a win), you get increased per capita productivity as people expand their skills.
Well, for one thing, critical thinking and communication skills seem to be in short supply.
Have you observed a lot of critical thinking and good communication from recent college grads?
Students in America don't have jobs. You can be motherfucking Einstein but you will still have to be a waiter in a cafe to contribute to society and pay for your student room.
When you are 20 you don't need sleep.
I hope you aren't hit by a sleep-deprived 20 year old driving from their night shift to an early morning class.
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As long as people are allowed to vote in the US, we have an incentive to ensure they are all well educated.
Surely a large part of this problem that the article doesn't mention is that college is too fucking expensive. And an obvious solution to that is to tax rich people and use that to fund universities so that students don't have to go so far in debt in order to become productive members of society.
It's crazy how many problems today boil down to "a tiny fraction of elites are hoarding all the wealth" and yet we seem to assume the solution of "tax them and use that money to benefit others" is simply impossible.
We can always add more funding, but at some point it must be admitted that our system does not efficiently turn funding into education.
But if we care about people being educated enough to vote, a high school education is enough. Or at least, what high school was 50 years ago was enough.
If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.
Ironically, improving access to education funding may be what made college more expensive.
The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. The tough pill to swallow, if we are to follow in e.g. Sweden's footsteps, is that you need to tax the middle class a lot more if you want the government to provide more services.
By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio and switching to Whole Foods when we're not even on pace to pay off the house??
1: https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-ta...
> The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso.
I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument.
My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
Some amount of inequality is healthy. The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
> By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE.
Good point! It would be really great if the government wasn't funneling billions into the coffers of defense companies by starting nonsense wars.
Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations and going into greater debt for it is a two-handed gift to the rich: they pay less taxes and they make money directly from the government by being paid interest when they loan money to the government.
> I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument
Do you only ingest ideas from places that you're already inclined to believe? How do you get challenges to your beliefs?
> is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
> Some amount of inequality is healthy.
What amount of inequality is just right, then? On one hand you suggest that we should redistribute to lower inequality, but on the other you seem to see some kind of beneficial role, or at least a neutral role, of inequality in a society.
> The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
Countries as diverse as Sweden, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have worse inequality in wealth than the US[0]. On the other end, countries like Iceland, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan have similarly low wealth inequality. I might posit that wealth inequality doesn't even make the top 10 of what makes a health society that's nice to live in.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
I shouldn't have to tell you that "but it's a conservative think tank" is merely ad hominem. If you think Jessica Riedl is misrepresenting the facts, I and many others would appreciate your elaborating. I'm afraid you haven't even read it.
Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.
I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.
Debt is 120% GDP
Who's "we"? Parties in power have a huge incentive to keep voters uneducated and gullible.
You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.
Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.
> specific type of manipulable gullibility
A congregation trained to say “amen” on cue.
the denouncing of heresy may be even more important.
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." Inexpensive tertiary education means that more people go through the motions of being educated, à la high school, for an additional four years because "that's what they're supposed to do" and then emerge none the better for it.
A system of heavily subsidized post-secondary vocational schools, like what Germany has, seems like a better path.
I'm sure a lot of people assume it's immoral rather than impossible.
One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination and your comment is a prime example of that.
> One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination
This is pretty silly. Any amount of new knowledge tends to make the brain more critical. The only real exception is rote memorization without application.
The author has written a famous book on college admissions, but this piece doesn't really seem to add much to the discussion. I came away thinking that his publicist recommended he get his name out there more to help his brand or sell some more books.
More people read the Atlantic than read books on college admissions. It is possible and often useful to increase the number of informed people even without adding net new information.
I don't think the book that he's famous for talks about the demographic trends much at all. It's just something that parents are aware of, and that is talked about as one of the ways in which admissions numbers will change in the next decade or two.
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> On the flip side, perhaps no field has collapsed more dramatically than computer and information sciences: From 2014 to 2024, entry-level openings grew about 6%, while the number of graduates soared by 110%.
That seems more relevant to new CS grad unemployment than AI.
Well this has been essentially the plan since the 70's. The 60's scared the bejeezus out of the ruling class and they began taking steps to bring the people to heel from the 70's onward. In the words of Ronald Reagan's education advisor, Roger Freeman: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
I honestly don't buy this for several reason.
In the mid 90's, my affluent suburban high school was in panic mode, afraid that declining enrollment was an impending death spiral. My graduating class only had gasp 750+ students. Ten years after I graduated, entering the 2000's, enrollment had already surpassed 800 kids. The school had to build out an entire wing and completely remodel the athletic building to accomodate all the new students that were enrolling.
Likewise, attending college in North Dakota saw the same thing in the late 90's. Sheer panic the entire North Dakota college system was about to enter an enrollment desert. They wondered how can the Universities recruit more out-state students. Again, by early to mid aughts? Enrollment was off the charts. They had to buy buildings in the downtown area and convert them to a new "downtown campus" for several emerging and expanding majors. The campus saw a constant upgrade of facilities and buildings. It was completely the opposite. The entire system saw a massive transformation that continues to this day:
As of Fall 2025, the North Dakota University System (NDUS) reports a total headcount of 47,552 students, marking a 3.8% increase over 2024 and reaching its highest level since 2014. The University of North Dakota (UND) specifically achieved a record-breaking enrollment of 15,844 students in 2025, surpassing its previous 2012 record. Across the system, growth is driven by rising undergraduate numbers and an increase in high school students.
Over the past five or so years, there's been a small fluctuation, but overall the system has been surging as of late and is on solid ground for the next decade or so.
The North Dakota system is the very kind of system the article says is about to be greatly affected by the year 2040. That would require quite a drop off from where they currently are and the amount of growth they're having right now.
Again, I don't buy this since many of the people who are from out-state, many of them will settle down in North Dakota cities, get married and start families there. The cost of living is super low and its a very tax friendly state compared to many of its neighbors like Minnesota. Fargo, where NDSU (and by proxy Moorehead University and Concordia College) is located is still one of the fastest growing cities in the state, growing steadily at about a 2% pace annually. Which means the supply side of the equation isn't likely to die out any time either.
Tell that to WVU.
From my youth, I was infected with the desire to graduate college at all costs. I was adopted, and I was told that both of my birth-parents were college graduates (I later validated this as truth!) My adoptive parents were also both college graduates, though my mother chose against a career or employment in favor of motherhood, and active volunteering in church and civic spheres.
My sister and I were both groomed to go to college. We attended the standard college prep high schools. The choices were laid before us. Mom told me definitely not to attend UC Berkeley (because of the hippies and anti-war protests.) So, I chose UCSD and my parents basically handled all the paperwork; I sat down to write an essay, and I was totally in.
However, mental illness ruled my life and I dropped out of classes. An excuse by my therapist got me restarted but not for very long before the second dropout. I tried community college for a semester and earned one more good grade (in C programming). I started work, foolishly believing that would go better than college! My life fell apart around me and college remained unfinished for decades.
Finally by 2017 I was stable enough to consider college again. Of course I should have understood that my career was not a thing, and at that point, college was the frivolous pipe-dream of an aging guy unable to really support himself. Nonetheless, I did the FAFSA, and Uncle Sam paid for the rest of my college bills.
I again dropped out, for reasons of being less-than-stable, but I had managed to earn 3 CompTIA certifications and I also landed a very nice job, which I held for over 4 years. None of those would've been possible without the drive to finish college.
Ultimately, the community college found a way to "graduate me" and award me a certificate of completion (instead of the Associate's in Applied Science which I was pursuing.) My "graduation ceremony" occurred in the US Postal Service station. Receiving that certificate was 100% a surprise, but a Pyrrhic victory.
At this point, I achieved my "bucket list" of graduating college, but I have 0 career prospects, and the certificate means 0 to my former or prospective employers (the certifications also meant nothing to them!)
So what did Uncle Sam really pay for? My personal satisfaction? Just to funnel more taxpayer money to the college system? I am fine with that, I suppose.
But it just goes to show that far more families push their children to attend college, and the expectations are set too high, when many kids growing up really need some vocational skills and real-life street smarts to survive in this world. Tuition prices have been jacked-up absurdly by the proliferation of scholarships and grants. "Diversity" means any view except conservatives or Christians. We are in need of a reckoning, especially for land-grant and "Ivy League" institutions.
Unless the big universities “expand” by linking up with the regional colleges, giving them a branding cachet that will attract students, there is one group that will benefit enormously:
Conservatives.
They require an uneducated and ignorant electorate. It’s the only way they can hoodwink voters into voting against their own best interests.
Deregulation is the simple fix: quality of education and cost has predictably gone up due to regulation, as well as costs of doing business
I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen.
Against this backdrop, there was no world in which the price of higher education wasn't going to go dramatically up.
Do you have data to support this claim?
The data I have shows that expenditures have gone up, but no where near what the nameplate tuition has or what detractors claim:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...
College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities:
https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-in-Colleg...
My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
CPI component calculations done by the BLS shows "College tuition and fees", including adjustments for scholarships and grants, had a 63% increase from 2009 (to match the CB data baseline) to now, which outpaces overall inflation of 56% over the same timeframe. I'm not sure what methodology CB uses to show falling inflation-adjusted prices.
Granted, it's not a massive difference in those percentages[0], but because college is a large single-ticket item, that difference is probably felt more acutely.
> Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities
In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
[0]: As an aside, it's incredible that everyone half of their purchasing power in ~15 years, and a quarter in just the past 5 years alone.
> My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
That's true, but as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
I think we largely agree overall, the CPI numbers are close enough that I wouldn't dispute them; they align with my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices.
> In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
This is probably true, and campuses could run housing at less-than-market rates. Whether that would be a better model than just giving students more financial aid that then gets paid back to the University as rent is something we'd have to model. Either way, my point is that we've seen a significant increase in the cost of rent across the entire country in the post-COVID era. That makes the Cost of College seem higher, but is something that Universities are subject to as much as a cause of.
> as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.
> my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices
That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
They did not "flip cause and effect on its head" - There is strong evidence for positive causal returns to education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073805932...
> Under simplifying assumptions, including competitive labor markets, no direct schooling costs, and constant proportional returns, this specification yields an interpretable estimate of the average percentage increase in earnings associated with an additional year of schooling.
So, an individual student will be expected to have higher earnings with more schooling. But as a matter of public policy that involves taxpayer funding of higher education, I cannot accurately base those decisions on a methodology that assumes a cost of zero ("no direct schooling costs").
Your source also identifies that higher marginal returns are found in lower-income, lower-educated countries, which makes sense. How much marginal return (for the taxpayer dollar) can we expect in a high-income country with a service-based economy and a third of the population already having a bachelor's degree?