Comment by bumby
20 days ago
The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
It's because academia has, from antiquity to just vaguely recently, been a playground for the children of the rich to either pursue erudite passions or just to schmooze and make friends with other rich people's kids.
For normal people there wasn't a lot of point. Jobs didn't require these. My father, who just retired, had a high school education with no college, yet held what would nowadays require a bachelors in mechanical engineering, at a minimum. He himself considers himself quite lucky to have basically been the last person onto the no-degree train to the middle class.
I think to some degree this is a matter of capital formation not keeping pace with the general increase in education access for the rest of the workforce. We're educating people but our system struggles to produce companies that can gainfully employ them. And by "our system", I do think there's a nontrivial factor in bigcos conspiring to not ever run the labor market as hot as they did in the past decade. They'd rather grow slower than let employees have bargaining power.
I don't know why americans have this strange idea, but the first university in italy was created to learn law, which lead to a very well remunerated job.
So it's in no way a new thing.
It’s not entirely new (especially for the professional class like lawyers), but as the poster indicated, it’s relatively new for the middle class
>vaguely recently
I’d argue it’s not vague at all. In the US, I think it can be traced directly to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, starting in 1862. I think that’s when college focus began to move from a liberal arts focus to a vocational focus.
Then those surveys were only of privileged students who had the connections and the family backing to not worry about thier livelihood.
I can guarantee you that my mom went to college so she could get a job (retired teacher). My dad went to school because it was free as a veteran. But he made more as a factory worker.
I don’t know a single person who went to college with me for any other reason than a career.
I also bet those surveys didn’t go to the now Historically Black Colleges and Universities - the only ones that my mom could go to.
I disagree. Because starting in the 1940s, there were large masses of less privileged people going to college on account of the GI Bill. They still had different views about college than we see currently (anecdotes not withstanding).
Do you think people coming out of the military - many with no skills that they thought could help them get a job after they left - went to college to be better citizens of the world and not to get a job?
If you listen to military recruiters now, they emphasize the ability to be able to get a job after you leave through training.
Also the statistics show that lower income people statistically go into the military.
When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I can guarantee you that most people’s first priority is to support their addictions to food and shelter and are most concerned with making money to do so. It’s only the privileged who have parents who can support them while they are getting launched who can afford to get degrees in areas like Ancient Chinese Art History or more realistically journalism and work for low pay in high cost of living areas.
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Decades ago college was for the people who were financially secure and could choose a life of the mind. Now it's a prerequisite for almost any real job. Guess what, the programmers grinding Leetcode aren't doing it for the thrill of solving a puzzle either.
This was true pre-GI-Bill, maybe, which puts it way out at the edge of living memory. It took a while for it to become a requirement for such a large proportion of jobs, but that's when the shift got going, and in a hurry.