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Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
The missing ingredient here is federal student loans. The federal government offers an unlimited, no-questions-asked, zero-collateral loan to every high school graduate who wants one. Most 18 year-olds lack the impulse control to care about saving their 30-something future self $100,000 if it means they have to turn down living in a luxury resort for four years. As far as the students' day-to-day budgets are concerned, every school is free, so amenities are the only way for the schools to compete. Price literally never even crossed my mind when I was choosing colleges.
Eliminate federally backed student loans (or at least place a reasonable cap on what they'll cover), and most of the cost disease goes away.
Federal student loans are capped, though. The six figure student loan debts are private lenders, who are willing to make the loans because they're not dischargeable.
Point taken. $12,500 per year for undergrads and an unlimited amount for plus loans and grad school is still pretty crazy though. I myself have nearly $250,000 in federal student loans, plus the $20k-ish in plus loans my parents got to help with my undergrad. Never took out a private loan.
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This seems plausible, but I remember when visiting colleges a lot about five star chefs and dorms with private bathrooms and campus gyms. Not a lot about the scholarships available. Granted this was over a decade ago.
I am in my mid-30s, so I imagine we were looking at colleges around the same time. To be fair, I do also remember being shown the shiny new cafeteria and student union, and hearing about the new football stadium they were building, but I didn't care at all as a 17 year old. My parents were there with me, though. In hindsight, perhaps these amenities were aimed at convincing the parents, since they would be the ones actually footing the bill. Kind of obvious now that I write it out.
To be clear I opted not to go to college, so don't claim to be the expert on how 17 year olds pick which one(I didn't really get that far into the process). I have a hard time imagining 'your meal card will cover chic-fil-a' was aimed at parents so much as students, but I remember my mom commenting on who had free laundromats vs paid, so that might be part of it.
How has that worked out for you? I have been thinking about whether or not I should send my kids to college. My kids are smarter than average and we plan to homeschool, so I think we could set them up for success pretty well. At the same time, I'm concerned that not having the magic paper might hinder them early in their careers. Have you experienced that?
I'm an HVAC tech. I make a comfortable living, I might put in somewhat more hours onsite than a typical white collar worker for a roughly equivalent salary, but I spend a lot less time working from home. IDK if it evens out in my case, but there's a lot of HVAC techs who work ludicrous amounts of overtime. My training pipeline wasn't any shorter but it was mostly paid(granted, often at fast food wages), whereas college would not have been. Good tech schools for commercial are far cheaper(and shorter) than college, good tech schools for residential are shorter but have similar per-semester cost. I moved out at a similar age to my college educated peers but could buy a house sooner(I have thanked my lucky stars ever since, given the trajectory of DFW real estate). Benefits are roughly equivalent to white collar workers, but in a less comfortable work environment. I do have to pay for tools but I get a take home vehicle so it roughly evens out after a large initial investment. If your son is not white-passing, he will likely face some level of discrimination in entering the field. If it's your daughter, she will face a ginormous amount of discrimination in entering the field; in this case that discrimination is probably justified due to the physical demands. Neither of these problems is going to get fixed anytime soon. Health problems shorten HVAC careers brutally; diabetes can be a fatal condition if you work on a roof in the summer, even if it's well managed, and one sign of a good tech school is that it tells students to go ahead and drop out if they have less than perfect health on the first day. Drug tests are industry standard, including for pot, and a good driving record is necessary for most jobs. I have a fairly steady year-round work position, but this is definitely not universal in the industry and budgeting is a necessary skill.
A lot, but not all, of what I said is just generally applicable to any trades career.
Thanks, this is a good reality check. There seems to be a lot of romanticization of the trades happening these days, and I've always been a little skeptical. Sounds like hard but steady work that comes with its own set of tradeoffs. One of my sons is technically inclined but a bit ADHD/on the spectrum. I've been wondering if he would do better as a field tech of some sort rather than as a white collar desk jockey. Personally, my years as an IT dispatch tech were the most fun I ever had in my working years. Long hours and lots of BS, but a great crew, rewarding work (you can see the things you fix), and I loved getting paid to drive around and see different towns and the "backstage" side of many businesses. Sounds like working a trade has some similarities.
ADHD will not harm an HVAC career. Autism, assuming it's actual autism, probably will. Minimum social competency is required to move up the career ladder and if your son is the classic nerdy introvert with little physicality this will probably not come particularly easy to him. In particular electricians haze their apprentices brutally and HVAC expects either a salesman or an aggressive, takes-no-shit-from anybody personality.
The usual trades career path is grunt work with the jailbirds-apprentice-technician/journeyman-maybe master. Stupid people don't(because they can't) get their master's license but it's not universal among good technicians- manager pay isn't actually a big increase over hourly so lots of guys treat it as a meh/why bother. Both grunt workers and apprentices are basically doing the demanding physical stuff to pay for their learning and skinnyfats usually fail out. Grunt workers are, as I mentioned, on a crew full of jailbirds, near-actual retards, and fresh meat that may or may not make it, apprentices usually work one on one with a technician. Neither one is exactly a 'great crew'.
I found tech school easy to pay attention to compared to k-12. The curriculum was most like a science class, but very... applied? Hands on? Something like that. It shortens career progressions; it does not let you skip steps.
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