Humanities graduates don't show improved earnings immediately, but the value of the degree pays off in lifetime earnings.

Or maybe the point is to kill off humanities and social science programs entirely.

The focus is on STEM only. On the one hand, they push STEM while the other hand takes away money for science and medical research by universities and the NIH that provide jobs. Everything this administration does makes zero sense.

that everyone on the planet knows well. He was accepted into their management training program and his first position was in sales analytics. The company (and most companies) didn’t care wtf you studied in college, only that you are smart, have critical thinking skills and excellent communications skills.

He is now, 11 years later, and 2 companies later, Manager of Sales operations for one of the biggest cybersecurity software tech firms. At 32 he is already in the top 10%.

Not a single “stem” class except the usual ones to fulfill basic requirements. Not a single business class either as his college (very small liberal arts college) offered zero of those.

My friend’s D got a great job at Google right out of college. She was an art history major at Williams. Don’t know where she is now, but I’m sure she is doing better than just fine.

Wall Street, for years, has hired Philosophy majors and I read AI companies are now hiring a lot of them, too.

Universities are too expensive now. Students never before had to consider whether their degree would gain them access to a career that would pay them enough to comfortably pay off their student loans. That is a huge problem.

Perhaps there should be caps on loan amounts for degrees associated with low-wage professions.

Should a social worker be allowed to saddle themselves with $250k worth of taxpayer-funded government-backed loans? Stressful!!!

Personally, I think people who are doing the world a favor by taking up these professions should have free college, but I'm not the king.

a year for undergrad. . It’s gone up a bit in the last ten years, but not by much. It’s way less money than most can borrow to pay for a car.

Of course, parents can take out Parent Plus loans. Or a student can take out private loans with an co-signer. But those have nothing to do with the Federal student loan program. Students can take out more for graduate school loans.

Most students, except the ones from very wealthy families, do not pay anywhere close to the list price of colleges. Even the very wealthy get merit aid at many colleges, except at the elite of the elite, which don’t give merit aid. They elite schools do, however, all have extremely generous institutional grants, offered to students with parents whose income can be $200k/year. But you have to be able to get in, which is the hard part.

In NYS tuition at SUNY is free for those with incomes under $150/yr (I think that is what it is now)and there are so many campuses, most students live near one the can commute to, saving thousands in room and board costs.

You just have to promise to work in NYS for at least 5 years after graduating.

...but two big ones are that universities have no control over whether or not students learn, or whether employers choose to hire them one way or the other. Anyone who has ever taught university classes knows than learning is a student choice-- we can't unzip students' heads and pour knowledge into them. Students have to choose to do the actual hard work of learning a lot about many things in a short time. It's a challenge they have to respond to. All the university can do is provide them with opportunities to learn. What students do with those opportunities is entirely up to them.

Employers, on the other hand, are under significant pressure that's completely independent from considerations of academic success (or university prestige) to hire workers at the lowest possible salary. They will happily underpay any workers they can, and in today's college graduate job market the graduates are usually at a disadvantage that's driven by market forces, not applicants' academic qualifications. Our capitalist system provides strong incentives to decouple earnings from academic achievement to the greatest possible extent.

I think this is all just part of our current American anti-intellectualism, especially strong on the political right. Shit on universities because, you know, educated "elites."