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A new ‘solution’ to student homelessness: a parking lot where students can sleep safely in their cars
(hechingerreport.org)
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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WHY are Less people Going to College?
College costs are ridiculous.
Student loans are extortionate.
The ROI on the investment is shitty. IOW you get an expensive degree for a job field that doesn’t pay enough to pay for the degree and living expenses.
There’s a big social media anti-college push. Don’t know whether that’s politically motivated/propaganda, just get rich being a tiktokker or something, or a combination of that and all of the above.
it's an easy message when they already turned college into a scam. I went 10 years ago and I felt like I was getting ripped off. I ended up flunking out and now my student loans I'll never pay off are in default. we need to make employment less dependent on credentials
I think it can be. The problem is colleges and student loan businesses pushing the idea that (expensive student-loan available) college is necessary for a job.
Only certain jobs really need a degree, like medical, engineering, aviation, finance, etc. and probably in the arts it could be helpful, but anything that a proficiency that can be demonstrated with a certificate and/or skill like programming, welding, whatever… yeah. Degrees shouldn’t really be a thing.
Everything in America just doesn't work right. It's either falling apart from lack of Maintenance or it's corrupt
Higher education is necessary. Most kids coming out of high school are incapable of almost anything except basic labor jobs. As our industries get more complex, skilled trained people are more and more necessary.
Certificates/degrees are incredibly valuable.
There are base skills everyone learns from an associates degree regardless of the focus.
Like adult skills. Managing time. Being responsible. Learning how to interact with others professionally. Learning to write better. And some better math skills.
Yes, but everything you listed is the kind of crap we should be teaching in high school, and aren't. That's because America has a fascination with transforming our middle and high schools into tiny little prisons and disciplinary systems rather than places where education happens.
In a theoretical correctly functioning modern society, college absolutely should not be necessary to earn a living except if you wish to enter a specialized field where a significant degree of additional training and accreditation is required in order to, among other things, ensure public safety. If you want to be a doctor or dentist, lawyer, architect, critical infrastructure engineer, etc., then yes. Absolutely, there should be a degree for that.
No one should be attempting to demand with any kind of straight face that it should be "required" to have a nonspecific bullshit degree to get a job in sales, marketing, retail or even retail management, graphic design, programming, etc. In fact, the vast majority of both white collar and blue collar jobs in reality have absolutely nothing to do with getting a degree other than showing employers that you're Willing To Play The Game.
Ive been in and out of college since 2014 and my most recent attempt, specifically one programming course, was the final straw that made me throw my hands up and say fuck it ill teach myself.
On top of paying out of state tuition, i had to pay fees that were meant to support the online learning platform the school used to deliver virtual courses. No biggie, every school ive attended has the same fees. However, this one programming course was integrated with pearson and not just for a few assignments, but for literally everything. Every module, assignment, quiz, etc. was a hyperlink to pearson. My teacher was doing 0 teaching and grading, I was still expected to pay fees for the schools learning platform that was nothing but hyperlinks to pearson, and then on top of all of that i was expected to pay an extra fee to use pearson's platform. But, wait, it gets better. The hyperlinks to pearson were actually directing to pearson's in-house built course that they openly sell on their site at a lower rate than what my school tried to charge me and with a longer access period than I would have gotten through my school.
UMGC, university of maryland global campus, essentially tried to outsource my education to a 3rd party and then asked me to front the cost in addition to their own fees. Yeah, no, i withdrew from the school. As much as I want my bachelors, its not worth it if i have to play these games.
Yeah the professors dont teach shit but having a structured course telling me what order to learn things in and forcing me to do exams, projects, etc. is pretty helpful for learning. Self teaching sht based off whats freely available is hard. There are many paid courses out there for anything online tho. Some ppl do well without structure and they might as well not goto college, learn it all on your own, I do not.
they can't afford it and a college education no longer guarantees you a good wage outside of very specialized and difficult fields of study. also fewer and fewer people are prepared for college, as our secondary and primary education systems have gotten worse.
in the 1990s you could major in English from a cheap state school and walk off to a 40K job. You maybe had 5-10K in college debt. in the 2020s you major in English from a top tier school and you're lucky to get a job that pays you 30K a year, if you can find one at all. Your debt is more like 20-40K. This is pretty much true of other majors as well, even basic technical ones.
Meanwhile the COL from the 90s has tripled or quadrupled. So your purchasing power is even effectively been dropped to like 1/6 of what it was in the 90s.
My no name company hires data entry workers for about 45K to start. We only hire people from top tier universities with specialized degrees, and we have an over abundance of applicants, that's why we can be so picky. Our mid tier employes have to have Masters degrees from top 10 uni and are only making 50-60K to start. if you went to a state university we throw your resume in the trash.
Boys are being fed that college degrees are useless, and women are starting to attend college at slightly higher rates. From a realistic perspective, the costs are just crazy.
If I were a kid today, I’d totally go to vet school in Europe.
Out of interest I looked up the price difference.
Typical fees per year in the EU range from zero up to around 3K euro (about $3500) with most being below 1K.
US starts at around 12K for in state public and goes well over 40 for private or out of state.
That's debt for life levels depending on the earning potential of your course.
Crazy financial gamble to have to take at 18.
It’s worse than that. The fastest track to veterinarian is 7 years (typical 4 year degree + 3 year accelerated veterinary degree at the university of Arizona). In Europe, my research yielded 5 years total.
The millennial generation was called the echo boom generation because it is significantly larger than Gens X & Z. There was also a massive expansion in the percentage of millennials going to college over previous generations.
So millennials were the largest generation and had high college rates that Gen Z can't match.
Because in earlier schooling they never learned the difference between “fewer” (used with a noun that can be counted) and “less” (used with noun treated as a mass or volume or level)