https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_104.20.asp shows educational attainment by those age 25-29 by year in the US:
Year High school Bachelor's
1920 <22.0% <4.5%
1940 38.1% 5.9%
1950 52.8% 7.7%
1960 60.7% 11.0%
1970 75.4% 16.4%
1980 85.4% 22.5%
1990 85.7% 23.2%
2000 88.1% 29.1%
2010 88.8% 31.7%
2013 89.9% 33.6%
The college experience also is part of what students make of their resources. Even at a commuter school I found an active social life and gained great leadership experience through one of the clubs.
Also, my school is more vocational for engineering and that’s pretty much what employers want. They don’t want to spend the time and money to train new hires. The school itself is dirt cheap in comparison to the more prestigious schools, but I know hard work and gaining skills are what’s going to get me the job.
Most jobs require self-learning even for the people who have a huge experience in the field at other companies. Everybody knows that and it has nothing to do with the requirements of having a 4 year diploma to obtain an interview for certain positions. This is simply a company policy, but many companies have such policy for certain positions and those who neglect this fact are at disadvantage of never being considered for such positions, they have limitations that may be much harder (impossible?) to overcome. It may be just easier to attend a 4 year college and obtain that required piece of paper and still be prepared to self-learn at every place that may hire you, learn time and again…
Isn’t there an Old adage something along the lines " going to college just proves to an employer that you are able to learn"?
@saintfan wrote
YMWV w online education, just like it will vary w at-home exercise equipment.
My mom has a treadmill at home, and she uses it religiously. GMTspouse bought me an unrequested exercise device (what’s the message??? :-w ) The machine just sits there unused. OTOH, when I had a paid, live tennis instructor to bark at me, I exercised.
@ pizzagirl < Well, reputation matters a lot for certain kinds of people, for whom nothing is worth doing unless other people are clapping their hands in admiration, and you’re clearly one of those kinds. Which is, of course, fine - chacun a son gout and all. .>
I got graduate degree at Stanford and, yes!, name does help a lot. Although I am not employed in the area of my major, Stanford degree helps, a lot. Just the name.
I learned far more things at my job than I ever learned at Stanford. I got far more information through MOOCC and extension classes than I ever got at Stanford. Stanford was a nice place - social life, climate, support. Do I want my kids to go to Stanford? Yes! But I would rank “education” component as far less important than reputation and social climate. Thanks to internet, one can learn almost any subject independently.
< As you said, the problem isn’t making the knowledge available or even how to teach it - there are many many ways to do that, many valid instructional methods, even these new ones. It’s overcoming challenges like motivation, aptitude, interest, poverty, family environment, innate talent, etc.>
Is it even possible to overcome? My father was born in a slum, dirt instead of floor, leaky roof, no water or electricity. His father (my grandfather) was an alcoholic, although very kind and mellow and with an innate gift of poetry. My dad grew up to become a very successful physician, poverty, and family environment didn’t slow him.
Motivation, aptitude, interest, innate talent - you can’t really change it. Kids either have it or not. It is utopian to think that we may have a society that is 100% motivated and talented.
Inasmuch as my previous post was negative about the universal need for tertiary education and decried the existence of academic wasteland, there are limits to the lack of benefits of an education at a highly selective school. Spending time in close quarters with your academic peers and being guided by dedicated mentors do go a LOT further than the comparable MOOC class. Both have their place and target different students or the same students at a different time in their life.
In so many words, there are a GREAT number of things that one can pick at the type of school mentioned above. In my experience, there were plenty of things that simply could not be achieved without a physical presence on campus. For example, one can read all the books of Peter Drucker, but it would never surpass discussing current events in his … kitchen! Some things are just priceless!
Well, I’m both, so…
Part of the problem on this thread (and similar ones) is that so many of the discussants are talking past each other. This is because everybody’s talking about the purpose of the higher education system in the US—but we don’t have a higher education system in the US. Rather, we have multiple systems, each of which has different purposes.
And I’m not just talking about community colleges vs. LACs vs. regionals vs. research-intensives—I mean that we have a good 15 or 20 different college systems that have grown up here, and they all serve different purposes and different roles (and quite often, to make it even messier, the same place falls into different systems). Further, different students/families fit into different systems precisely because they have different background and needs (which, I would opine, is simultaneously a strength and weakness of our lack of a single unifying system).
So yes, college is a commodity. It also is emphatically not a commodity. It all depends on which colleges and which students you’re focusing on.
Does anybody have a doubt that private schools are businesses?
Time was when the intensely intellectually curious went to get further education primarily to pursue their passions and fulfill their nature, and the wealthy went because it was the class thing to do.
That was then.
Further education provided class mobility, (the rich didn’t need it, but they wanted to remain in the loop at least conversation-wise 
) and so it became one vehicle and eventually an important one for movin’-on-up.
Today even jobs that should in no way require a BA insist on it. I’ve seen such requirement for receptionists in law offices. Why? Because they can. They imagine it says something and will reflect better on their team.
Now it is a commodity.
“I got graduate degree at Stanford and, yes!, name does help a lot. Although I am not employed in the area of my major, Stanford degree helps, a lot. Just the name.”
I think you needn’t delude yourself that everyone you meet is impressed with you because you have a Stanford degree.
A receptionist position at a law firm requires the ability to write a grammatical email; check vendor invoices for errors (deliveries which show up at the “front door” vs. computer equipment and things that arrive via purchase order); know basic life skills like don’t call a partner in Europe at 9 am Eastern time at home-- since you will likely wake her up, etc.
Time was when being a high school graduate meant you knew this kind of stuff. And if you’ve ever had a receptionist without these basic skills, life is horrific for everyone who has to deal with him/her. Hiring a college graduate is no guarantee, but you’ve increased the odds that someone knows the difference between hour vs. our; its vs. it’s; etc. With email and spellcheck, even clerks and receptionists need to be able to write a grammatical message.
Or to know when a partner at the local office got the time zones backward so that you know 9:00a Eastern is probably the perfect time to catch a partner in the European office at work, and how to tell the local partner so.
Hope you don’t take that personally, @blossom—I’ve set up teleconferences with folks on other continents and gotten the times backward at first, too, so I’m just as guilty of it myself.
Honestly, I HATE these baby boomer chitheads who always go on and on like college is nirvana where you can find yourself. It’s almost like they don’t see that college is super expensive and overpriced. Let’s be honest here. Would anybody pay tuition to go to college and keep this guy employed if there was no return on investment?
"“I got graduate degree at Stanford and, yes!, name does help a lot. Although I am not employed in the area of my major, Stanford degree helps, a lot. Just the name.”
Well, I stopped reading right there. Didn’t even make it past the second article. LOL.
People don’t buy cars or houses as commodities - those are not reduced to purely economic terms. Some people like yards, hardware floors, walk in closets, good car stereos, sunroofs, skylights, 0-60 in 8 seconds or less, or hundreds of other intangibles that go into the purchase decision of a car or house or college.
Pizzagirl,
That is not even remotely close to what the poster was implying. Perhaps spending more time reading for meaning rather than immediately replying would help.
I am at Oberlin College today (for an arts festival) and the college t shirts have a saying on the back that I think is apropos to this thread
“Success is not about the amount of money you make, but the difference you make in somebody’s life” Michelle Obama
Seems a strong message on the point of view of the LAC
A “no-frills” college education is not a commodity. The commodity element comes in when a university upgrades otherwise functional facilities to entice students and their families.
A university eduction can generate a bundle of benefits that include both market/economic returns and non-market returns. I think it might be hard to find anyone, or even any economist, who wouldn’t readily accept that. However, the necessary human capital investment is not costless. The danger lies when we extrapolate or extend the logic that because many of the returns are difficult to easily quantify or measure in economic returns, then a college eduction becomes somehow “priceless.” More specifically, the danger is when someone with difficultly judging appropriately ex ante investments for colleges, borrows beyond their ability to repay, or unnecessarily. As the trend continues for more and more or the cost of public colleges to be pushed onto students and their families, the concern is that the needed financial literacy won’t be in place to help students make wise borrowing and college investment choices. The public danger lies not in when we tend to treat college like a commodity, but when we deny this perspective.