And your stance is anecdotal.
The majority of employers seek college graduates for the most entry level of jobs. If you do not know or see that you are willfully ignorant or drolling. Either way it’s a bad faith argument on your part.
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This reminds me that a lot of American K-12 public schools don’t adequately prepare their post-secondary-bound students for the next stage in their educations. The traditional American four-year college plan has gradually extended to five and sometimes six years because students are thrown into the deep end freshman year without any formal training in navigating an academic bureaucracy, in personal finance, in organisation and planning, in self-advocacy, and all too often in basic writing and math and research skills (even selective universities have to offer remedial courses).
Now if a student is very self-directed, or comes from a family of multi-generational college grads, or goes to a private college prep school or “feeder” public school (with the economic and usually racial privileges that implies), chances are they’ll get through in a reasonable amount of time with not only the credential but an education (even if they switch majors partway through). Most American students don’t start out with any of those advantages, so if the government is going to offer free tuition (which it absolutely should) and want the students to get the most out of their post-secondary education there needs to be some basic prep work offered in all American secondary schools.
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The GI Bill in the 1940s was enough to seriously subsidize the cost of a college education at the time.
Today the GI Bill doesn’t even cover your monthly food bill let alone anything close to the cost of tuition.
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Much like the US then.
Only the US universities cost shit tons of money to attend.
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From what I gathered, a lot of people against this think that anyone struggling is because they majored in some bullshit area that doesn’t have much of a real world use.
Never mind that the cost of college has gone up and wages are stagnant. Hell my dad has a FORESTRY degree, but managed to find work and eek out a living (granted he took business and sales courses later).
I know people with law and medical degrees struggling to pay off their loans still. Certainly some people are in bad positions from poor choices, but a large number of people are suffering through no real fault of their own.
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I would also argue that not every degree should be a “practical” one. My daughter is attending a liberal arts school for a music degree, majoring in voice. She purposefully went to a much lower cost school than say a high end conservatory or big U because she didn’t want to be saddled with debt she couldn’t pay off.
But is her choice of education and vocation “less” or a “poor choice” because she’s not an engineering or computer science major? NO! We need artists and philosophers and other “non practical” roles in society. Just because person A doesn’t see Forestry as a valuable degree, doesn’t mean they get to shit all over it.
(I think we agree on this BTW - in case that isn’t clear).
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Interestingly while I was going to University it was believed that paying yourself by at least in part actually working significantly increased the probability of graduating. At the time tuition was about $1000 to $1200 per semester (in-state). Plus books, room/board.
I also think that lower debit load (or work between semesters to pay off) would be far more in the grasp of most people.
The current situation where almost no one has the savings to go and all need a grant or a loan or both would clearly be far better if tuition was zero, and all you needed to find was room/board and books. That is something people could in far more cases be expected to save for, or be able to pay off with a reasonable rate loan.
Sure it would be even more affordable if “free collage/university” also paired for books, room and board, but it might not be useful for it to be quite that affordable…and even if it is a 99.6% solution is clearly better then the 3% we got now, maybe we should take it and see if we need to fight for the last 0.4% or if it works out fine?
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It’s also not always easy to predict which areas of study will have “practical” applications in one’s career some day. Steve Jobs credited his experience studying hand calligraphy in college as one of the reasons he pushed to get variable width fonts for the Macintosh.
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It’s almost like being a well rounded person is a net benefit in and of itself! But that can’t be right, can it? How does familiarity with art, literature, music, history, and philosophy make you fat stacks? /s
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It’s still the same. That’s why Germany is known all over the world for their easygoing partying, fueled by exporting natural sources and Nazi gold.
I agree. Although I’d say a music degree can be practical - there are lots of things one can do with it - some of them pay better than others, but like you said, arts are important. (Fun fact, I have a BFA.)
I would say to a degree I agree with some of the detractors that pursuing a niche degree that has very little opportunity outside of academia (which NEEDS teachers in those fields, but there is a limited number of those), and they took them from an expensive college vs a cheaper state school or the like - I can see their point. But I think that is a tiny fraction of people and is taking a stereotype that overshadows the bigger problem of stagnant wages and over priced education.
OH I agree. And I know lots of people with liberal arts degrees like English and History who aren’t in those fields, but are still in good jobs. I even know a guy USING his history degree. A degree alone doesn’t guarantee success, but success or failure is only partly dependent on the individual. Where they started from, the opportunities presented, external economic factors, and dumb luck play a big part too.
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Ditto. I have been fortunate in life and career enough to have paid mine off early. And thanks to my father’s own good fortune in life and business (and also crazy work ethic) he played a big part in making sure myself and my siblings did not graduate with a crushing amount of debt (~just 20k or so).
I know many who are not so fortunate. Let them have a break: I already got mine.
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There is a brute fact: A university (or any educational operation) is not cheap to operate and maintain–any more than is, say, a bus factory or even a coal mine. Its “productive” capacity and output are immaterial, but it still requires material resources and a specialized workforce–and unlike a widget factory, its workforce is not made up of more or less interchangeable, easily replaceable units, nor are its product lines quickly reconfigurable.
So there is never going to be a university or college that will respond to “market forces” the way that, say, a plastics factory might. And even thinking of the university output as product–a human unit with particular, definable job or career prospects, ready to plug into the current economic environment–reduces the university to the most utilitarian kind of trade school. (An institution for which I have great respect–I want my skilled-trades people to really have skills. Son of a deep-blue-collar family, etc.) Maintaining a university system requires a willingness to keep the plant operational even during periods of economic downturn–laying off faculty or shrinking library support is a kind of lobotomizing. Institutional memory is a real force in any organization, and in an enterprise that is all about knowing and doing, it is even more crucial. (I have watched an institution whittle itself into down to the point of dysfunction.) So post-secondary education is always, always going to cost somebody a lot. The question is, who and under what circumstances. (And this is going to have to connect with issues of accessibility, accountability, standards, and other matters that do not fit well onto a spreadsheet.)
Just some anecdotage from my personal dotage: I got to put my literature doctorate to its intended use (teaching) for a number of years, but when I lost the teaching gig, I eventually wound up a journalist–mostly covering, of all things, IT-in-business topics. Minimal connection with my official education (despite four undergrad computer science courses taken post-grad in the 1980s.) The writing part of grad school obviously contributed to my success, but what is less obvious is how well grad-school skills fed into the researching and interviewing and general project-wrangling that go into writing technical features. You can’t always predict what parts of college will wind up being “useful.”
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I know many who are not so fortunate. Let them have a break: I already got mine.
Thank you for the good reminder of perhaps the best reason to support policies like this.
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Don’t knock forestry. It may sound like it’s all about cutting down trees, but it has a lot to do with ecology and population dynamics and a lot of other stuff that we would respect a lot more if we were to simply call it “biology”.
I am considering going back to school, if only on a part time non degree basis, to study something like language or literature, just because it interests me and I have the opportunity to do so. Imagine my surprise that there are almost no classes on offer that have nothing to do with a career path or “professional development”. It’s as if the administration decided that since nobody’s building a big old literature factory downtown, it’s not worth offering any classes in this major except for dumbed down ones that comp sci majors can use to check off a box on their graduation requirements 
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Never my intention to knock forestry, but it is a bit of an uncommon degree, unless you’re in the lumber industry. My dad spent the last 45+ years in Kansas - no known for its forests.
He did side step into noxious weed management and then herbicides and agricultural equipment. So his general knowledge of plants and animals is pretty impressive. He still goes to county weed meetings and has more than once won the annual weed quiz.
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The interesting thing is, if you look at the undergrad degrees of bigcorp CEOs you see a lot of liberal arts degrees (probably more than STEM ones and certainly more than generic business/commerce bachelors). Ask any of them and they’ll tell you how they use what they learned then every day in the careers.
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People with forestry degrees can also work for the state, or for non-profits, too. It’s probably far more useful out west (or in Alaska), where there is a good deal of protected land that does need tending.
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Just a note on forestry degrees: When I was just a sapling, the New York State system (not yet called SUNY) had not only free-standing state teachers’ colleges but four programs embedded in private institutions. One of them was the forestry program at Syracuse University, and it was, like all the state programs, either free or really cheap, and it was famously academically brutal: easy to get accepted in (probably just a high school Regents Diploma) and even easier to wash out of–I want to say more than half of any incoming class, but those memories are nearly six decades old. Many of my farm-family classmates instead went to Cornell for ag or home ec and apparently faced less in the way of washout courses. (The fourth state program, also at Cornell, was hotel management, which was later absorbed into the private side of the university.)
I’m not sure about the career path for the home ec program (almost certainly high-school teaching), but the ag-engineering program often led beyond farming to, say, being an engineer at Caterpillar or selling ag equipment, as were the career fates of two of my classmates.
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Incidentally, my Mum has an Arts degree, majoring in the history of feminism.
She did that degree part-time in her late twenties, while raising two kids as a single mother.
She then used that degree as a springboard to work her way up from an entry-level clerk to eventually acting as the head of several government departments.
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