Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Universities are honestly the strangest institutions. Responsible for the feeding & caring of the nation's Science People, but also for credentialing a *bunch* of random jobs via licensure reqs that are all over the place; conduit for a $1.5T debt crisis but still much beloved

It's how I imagine religion *used to be,* so deeply entrenched and widely presumed that almost nobody even notices that the incentives at play seem unlikely to drive desirable outcomes and the proof is absolutely in the pudding

Does this seem a bit extreme? OK, but the story told by the numbers is that people are willing to pay essentially Infinite Dollars for whatever it is that college is gatekeeping, and back at the ranch scientific progress, the thing we were ostensibly funding, seems to have slowed

I think it's unlikely that my kids go to college, at least not at the modern price point. I don't know, maybe it'll be their rebellion. "Do I think you should take on the equivalent of a down payment for a million dollar house at 17, on non-dischargeable credit? No son, I do not"

The average student debt load upon graduation is about $27k: less than the average price of a new car, hardly a down payment on a $1 million house.

And only 14 months of the average wage premium of a bachelor’s degree over a HS diploma would cover $27k:https://twitter.com/informema/status/1212734650235441152 …

Primary driver of student debt = students who graduate late or not at all, which collectively make up the majority of all students. Nobody anticipates losing speed or dropping out, ofc. But the massive overall debt load is the smell test that the current system is failing

I agree that a 57% 6-yr completion rate is a huge problem. Much of this has to do with a lack of real mentoring of 1st-gen college students, who have much lower completion rates than those with a college-grad parent.