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I'm not sure how drowning in college debt until you're 40 qualifies as contributing to better mental health. All this among media reports that some (many?) employers are removing the college degree requirement.
There are different ways to look at this. However, I don't think this trend is going to last. As this world becomes ever more complicated, it becomes more important that people have more education--not less. What college does besides preparing someone for a job is to teach people how to think. I would say a second critical skill that is developed in college is writing talent. The modern world requires people who can think for themselves and people who can communicate effectively in both a written and verbal fashion.
I've known plenty of people who didn't complete college. Seldom do they possess very good writing skills. The other thing I've noticed is that while you can teach them the fundamentals of doing a job they lack any broader understanding. What do I mean by that? Ideally, someone who does a job thinks about ways to do the job better. They think about how the job fits into the greater scheme at work and maybe the economy in general. Such a person can tell an employer how the job can be redesigned and done more effectively. I'm generalizing a bit and you can probably find a few people here and there who are exceptions. However, most people behave exactly the way I've described above.
More women are completing college than men these days. In fact, its going to be a 60/40 ratio soon. If a guy wants to be married, he needs to know that most college educated women are not going to be interested in a man who did not complete a degree. Frankly, such women want someone who can they converse with on a certain level.
I sympathize with complaints about the high cost of a college education. Its gotten completely out of hand and something needs to be done about that. However, the key to eliminating college debt is to find cheaper ways to provide a college education--not to avoid it completely.
Any job whose performance requires completion of higher education will certainly attract those people with a degree. What makes me say "hmmm" is a job with a degree requirement that could be (and possibly has been) performed by any reasonably intelligent high schooler.
A college credential is often the means to ration "good" jobs, not necessarily evidence of skill or experience.
Also is often a requirement under labor laws, especially for "salaried" positions that have a lot of unpaid overtime.
However, there is no credential requirements for a business owner, in general.
Read between the lines.
In hindsight, I went to college because I feared life beyond education, i.e. High School, and I had to, to do what I wanted to. I am happy with my profession, but which I could have apprenticed, a la Abraham Lincoln. I have to re-educate every lawyer that works in my department notwithstanding their seven years of high-priced post-high school education.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-10-2023 at 11:29 AM..
Reason: Revising as per the poster.
Those with a college degree do not somehow have a special knowledge set that makes them more capable beings in the world. That's true to a certain amount, but it's by far not the whole picture.
Here's what is going on: those people without a degree have underlying issues - personality disorders, self discipline problems, addiction and substance abuse problems, criminal or abusive tendencies, mental health issues or handicaps etc... those people are the type of people who either don't want to get a college degree or aren't able to.
The life outcome problems identified by Mike were not caused by the lack of a college degree. The degree is just a convenient correlation marker that draws a line to say that people with this achievement are also much less likely to have all the above problems. It is those problems above that are what's causing bad health outcomes, bad relationship outcomes, and bad financial outcomes. And these things tend to snowball together and all be related to some extent.
On a personal note, I've briefly dated a decent number of women who didn't have degrees - most started but never finished. What came to light after knowing them was they had horrible sleep schedules, substance use in the past or present, had a perpetual set of crises that were always someone else's problem instead of their own actions, and some sort of mental disorder. Here's the thing, they not only were in bad financial shape, but their relationships were always rocky, and they were declining in health even though they were quite attractive individuals in their early 20s, and still were to a lesser extent in their late 20s.
I would imagine this is even moreso the case with young men than it is with young women, I just don't date them to know the inner details.
What's the solution? It's not more degrees, clearly. The main issue that keeps coming up is the lack of two active good parents. Beyond that, certain things are just lifestyle choices and you can't force someone to make good decisions - it just is what it is, some people are going to fail at life. The good thing is that today, many of those people aren't having kids.
You know, back in the late Jurassic era when I was in high school, the late 70s, they were swinging vo-tech towards the incorrigible teens. We actually had three tracks. We had the college bound, the business track which was actually training women to be secretaries, and vo-tech for the people that we knew were going to go nowhere.
This was also my experience in a large suburban school district in the 1980s. Both the "rich" high schools and the "working class" high schools in that district had three distinct tracks. Lots of guys followed the tradesman track -- a little math, a little science, maybe remedial English and history, but two hours of "Shop" per day.
Lots of women did the "pink collar track" -- same core courses plus Home Economics and Typing.
Only about 30%, aka the rest of us, did the college track -- and this was arguably the best public high school within five hundred miles. We got 2 into Harvard, 1 Princeton, 1 Dartmouth, 1 Yale, 2 Amherst, 1 Williams, 3 Stanford, and several dozen at notable, regional colleges. The rest went to State U.
First question: Is this not happening anymore at the large, urban and suburban, public high schools (where 80% of young Americans are educated)?
Second question (because I fear the answer to the first is no): What is being taught to the lower academic half of the class instead?
Phil, thanks for the post, it's good, but I think you may be extrapolating with a rather broad brush to paint non-degreed women based on your dating experiences. There are plenty of non-degreed women (and men) who are doing quite well. True, the lack of a degree isn't the prima facie reason for these deaths but having a degree does arm people with enough knowledge that most better educated people can work their way out of a jam or avoid one in the first place.
Degreed people are better able to fend for themselves and persevere in the rat race of employers, jobs, the cost of living and aren't shy about moving to greener pastures. These people keep plugging rather than give up in despair and feel hopeless with no way forward and no concept of the larger world outside the meager places where they've always lived.
The deaths do correlate and map quite well to areas and regions of lesser educated people, obesity, diabetes, low incomes, few jobs, uncaring conservative state/local governments, and little thought of moving to places where more and better jobs might exist for them and the health care resources that exist. The mountain hollers of Appalachia and sparse rural areas are thusly primed for deaths of despair as are the inner city wastelands.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-10-2023 at 02:04 PM..
People without a degree have underlying issues? That may be true for some people, but it sounds like you're painting America with a pretty broad brush. It also sounds like you're somehow disconnected from reality in some weird way. I get that all your family and associates/acquaintances are probably degreed and that insulates you from the unwashed masses, but...really?
Sorry - I should have phrased that better, not all people without a degree have issues. It's the opposite, I've seen too many people without degrees do just fine to make me believe that it's a simple degree > income > life outcome chain of causation.
What I'm saying is that we're not comparing apples to apples. If we took out the population with a felony, the population that's not in the labor force, the homeless population etc, population with disabilities, and compared that set of undegreed people to the ones with a degree, the differences would drop quite substantially. The degree is gate keeping all these people out, and that's actually the bigger difference than the pure income enhancing value of the degree.
I do agree that in the past, like say the 80s - the 10s, a degree offered a bigger leg up in the world. But that value is diminishing now with the labor force shrinking putting upward pressure on pay and availability of non degree jobs and there's more avenues than ever to craft out gig or self employable work. At the same time, we have a whole swath of the degreed job market in the gutter - teachers and nurses particularly - that are experiencing big declines in paycheck to effort.
So, to reiterate, it's the correlation - not the causation of lacking a degree that's causing these outcomes. If a degree isn't the causation, then neither is it the solution.
To Mikes point about the maps, this effect exists again. The ones who were the go getters usually up and left and went to Columbus or DC, and the people who weren't stayed back home in the holler. The highest earning counties in the US are next door to these hollers in Virginia. Again a self selection correlation.
On the topic of those impoverished areas, they all have a commonality of being a 'colony' or 'plantation' of unbridled resource extraction of the past centuries. Appalachia and the Mississippi delta should have never been settled that densely due to the geography. The areas that aren't scenic are emptying out pretty fast to a more natural state, like the west plains and delta, while people seem hang out in Appalachia. Out west places with topography like that are uninhabited, like the Siuslaw National Forest, cause it's a serious pain to build with no flat land.
Phil, thanks for the post, it's good, but I think you may be extrapolating with a rather broad brush to paint non-degreed women based on your dating experiences. There are plenty of non-degreed women (and men) who are doing quite well. True, the lack of a degree isn't the prima facie reason for these deaths but having a degree does arm people with enough knowledge that most better educated people can work their way out of a jam or avoid one in the first place.
Degreed people are better able to fend for themselves and persevere in the rat race of employers, jobs, the cost of living and aren't shy about moving to greener pastures. These people keep plugging rather than give up in despair and feel hopeless with no way forward and no concept of the larger world outside the meager places where they've always lived.
The deaths do correlate and map quite well to areas and regions of lesser educated people, obesity, diabetes, low incomes, few jobs, uncaring conservative state/local governments, and little thought of moving to places where more and better jobs might exist for them and the health care resources that exist. The mountain hollers of Appalachia and sparse rural areas are thusly primed for deaths of despair as are the inner city wastelands.
OK, but maybe the degree is just (one possible) marker for those other positive attributes. People who persevere get their degree if they have a chance, but some people persevere without ever having been offered a chance to get a degree. They might go into the military and succeed, as an enlisted person, and at some point during their career or after it, they might get a degree as it's now available to them. Just to name one more obvious success path that does not involve going straight from high school to college.
And it begs the question, what's the degree in? STEM, History as pre-Law, some other serious and difficult subject? A degree that good employers are asking for by name? Or "grievance studies", early childhood education, some other "path of least resistance"? Stark difference here.
While there has been some movement towards deleting degree requirements for jobs that actually can be done by people with no degree, in many cases, just not having a degree is a simple, objective marker that can be used to discard some resumes. When your boss puts 100 resumes in your inbox and wants you to narrow it down to the top 5 in a few hours, throwing out the non-degreed people is a simple way to narrow it down and does not put you afoul of any HR issues.
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