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I grew up being repeatedly told that college is absolutely necessary to get a good job and a secure future. And because you've been told it's necessary, they can get away with such a sharp increase in tuition costs. What are you gonna do, not go? Nah, you're gonna sign on the dotted line and put yourself into debt like all the adults told you to.

I've got a degree in a good field that's supposed to pay well. But the job market is such a mess that I never actually got my foot in the door - everything that claims to be entry level asks for five years of experience in a piece of software that has only existed for two years.

College used to be an investment, now it feels more like a gamble.

A thing that upset me when I went to college (15ys ago) was all the fluff electives I had to take. More than half of my classes were not associated with my major. I was looking into getting a masters a few years ago and one of the requirements was American History, again! I learned all of American history in elementary school, and all of it again in middle school, and all of it again in high school and again for my bachelors and I need to do it again for a Masters? Add along more sciences and math classes for an art related major. While I understand in building well rounded students, a lot of it seemed like it was meant to just beef up the number of classes I needed to pay for.

The number of electives needed was also enough where you only had two options.

1. Keep your part time job and take additional winter, summer or night clases and pay extra to get them in.
2. Have no job and fill your whole schedule with classes (each class was 3hrs long)

Wonder if it has to do with all the “college bad. Why go to college for $100k for a $40k job…” social media trends and the “get rich on social media” trend, along with the fact that college can be really expensive.

As an employer who hires folks in the data science field, I’ve become more disappointed in recent college graduate job-readiness every year for the last decade. At this point I’d prefer a resume to say “watched 100 hours of YouTube videos about data science” over a masters in the field.

And these poor people have 100k in student loan debt with no marketable job skills and are competing against 10s of thousands of other recent grads with no marketable job skills and college has created a lose-lose environment.

No wonder enrollment is dropping, the cost of the education is absolutely not worth it and people are starting to see it.

If I were a young person considering whether to get a degree, I'd think really hard about whether it's worth selling myself into what is essentially indentured servitude for increasingly long odds of landing a "good" job in a neo-feudal hellscape ravaged by climate change.

Is that in line with fewer potential students being available? The last millennials are done with school now and the generation replacing them aren't as numerous.

I so hope this is true. We have an extremely anxious teenager waiting for his early decision results expected out this week. I hope for every advantage he can get