The Higher Education Bubble and The New Grad Gap
As part of getting older, every once and a while I’ve been waking up between the hours of 2-4am (I also blame my lack of care for my health). This morning was one of those mornings so I got up, had a snack, walked the dog, and opened X to see the above graph in a tweet referencing how AI is impacting society. This is something I’ve known for a while being around early job seekers, but it was a convenient reminder to see data.
I started to dig some more and found more charts showing the problem. First, we’ve doubled the number of new grads in the past 25 years, today roughly 50% of Americans (by year born) are getting a college degree:
Second, over the same time period we’ve also doubled the cost in tuition of getting a 4 year degree.
AND, the average salary over that time has been flat:
This is a total racket being sold to the average American who are being told that a higher education is they key to a good life. Instead they’re going into debt on a low ROI investment:
Sometimes I think we get school confused with education. School is the place you show up to and go to class, education is in the curiosity you have to try new things, challenge yourself, fail, and learn. A lot of that can happen in a classroom (and classrooms can accelerate it), but we don’t solve the education crisis by taking low agency / curiosity people and putting them in school - it’s solved by teaching people critical thinking, which inherently isn’t mass-market.
There’s a financial bubble here (in the debt), but more importantly is the impact on society - a whole generation of people who aren’t contributing how they should because they’ve been told their liberal arts degree is worth something.