Summary
College enrollment among 18-year-old freshmen fell 5% this fall, with declines most severe at public and private non-profit four-year colleges.
Experts attribute the drop to factors including declining birth rates, high tuition costs, FAFSA delays, and uncertainty over student loan relief after Supreme Court rulings against forgiveness plans.
Economic pressures, such as the need to work, also deter students.
Despite declining enrollment, applications have risen, particularly among low- and middle-income students, underscoring interest in higher education. Experts urge addressing affordability and accessibility to reverse this trend.
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.
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All of my best hires for SE and related positions have been drop outs or self-taught folks. Sometimes there were minor gaps in knowledge of some of the fundamentals, leading to some wheel-inventing but on balance they were far more capable than the average Comp Sci graduate.
The worst hires, almost without exception, were those with graduate degrees. All hat no cattle.
When I interview new grads, I’m not concerned about detailed knowledge of certain technologies. I’m trying to figure out how quickly they can learn. My favorite question is to ask “what was the hardest bug you’ve ever had to solve?”.
Yep. “What’s the most interesting project you’ve been a part of” is my favorite. Same vane, opened the door to so many follow ups.
So often it’s “how do you translate temporal data for a random forest model” and then see run headlights as I have to explain the word temporal and then how feature selection for machine learning actually works.
They are literally only taught the Python code now, with no explanation of why, how, or when certain tools are appropriate. Real “Bang on a nail with a screwdriver long enough” level education.
Lol can you give me those YouTube videos. I’ll watch them all really good and you can hire me