I think you must take these concepts into account if you're going to think about how to "fix" or "disrupt" education.
1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.
2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.
3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.
4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.
5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) "top 100" universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and/or trade schools under the same umbrella of "education" and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.
People go to elite colleges for the same reason that you're on HN and not Reddit right now.
Think of the weird kids in football-obsessed small towns who really like school and read classic literature for fun. The kids who enjoy high-brow media like NYT/Economist/New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR in places where reading anything in public would get you accused of being uppity. The kids who want to be professors, surrounded by future business and communications majors.
Admission to an elite college, for these students, is chance to finally be surrounded by people smarter than they are, people who understand them, people who hold their own in debates both inside and outside the classroom and have interesting things to say, people who care about the world beyond how it can make them rich. Gen-ed humanities are tiny discussions around conference tables, and instead of staring blankly and cracking jokes, people actually contribute, erring on the side of too much rather than too little. To the one kid out of 35 who took English class seriously, that's fucking amazing.
Of course, these people exist in small quantities everywhere, but at many elite schools they exist with a density approaching 100%. The ability to come of age surrounded by that kind of crowd is incredible, and it should be available to everyone who has the taste and talent for it. Fortunately, donors tend to agree, and the endowment can usually make it happen.
Just want to tack on to number one, out-of-state schools. When an eighteen year old is presented with the option of choosing a first-rate (let's say top 100) out-of-state school or a second-rate in-state school, it's a hard decision that can lead to a 4x tuition hike.
The words you're looking for are "liberal arts education." The liberal arts are (roughly) fields concerned with the search for truth and the study of human life: math, philosophy, physics, biology, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, literature, etc. Some computer science programs should arguably be counted among the liberal arts, insofar as they're about something deeper than contemporary software engineering practice. Liberal is meant as in freedom: the objects of study worthy of a free person, particularly if you put a Marxist lens on it and consider wage slavery unfree.
The liberal arts do not have salary optimization or the production of skilled workers of any kind as their mission, though it may be a side effect in some cases. Finance, business, management, engineering, communications, etc. do not count, and a proponent of liberal arts education (like myself) would say they do not belong in an undergrad program.
Many people believe that the primary value of undergrad is a coming-of-age ritual where students develop as intellectuals and learn to be informed and rational citizens of the world. The best way to do this is with mandatory and rigorous breadth in the entirety of the liberal arts [0], and a particularly rigorous specialization in one. Those professions that require additional formal training ought to be studied in graduate and/or professional school, as is the case with law and medicine.
This was a mainstream view until sometime in the late 20th century when the "college as job training and investment in future salary" narrative took off. Many people now (coincidentally almost all are liberals) believe this was a mistake. These are the people you'll find letting their children study non-salary-optimizing fields and lending political support to taxpayer-funded higher education, including in not-necessarily-economically-useful fields.
Not relevant. I wanted hard numbers for students that don't take salary into account. I don't care about your apologetics for a field that pretends to take credit for granting the ability to think.
People from engineering fields and hard sciencies are much more rational citizens of the world than someone who spent all of their time on art history because they were required to rigorously think logically.
To the extent that we can infer desire for salary optimization by choice of major, I'd exclude humanities, social sciences, math and physical sciences (research is not particularly lucrative), and education. Those, taken together, are 46.4% of undergraduate degrees in 2011-12. CS, engineering, and business, on the other side, are 28.6% of undergraduate degrees [1].
Consider how arrogant it is to look at the history and present of human civilization, its institutions and customs and art and languages, what it claimed to know and how, what it fought for and why, who held power and how people thought about its legitimacy, what it valued and worshipped, and think "Nope, nothing there could possibly be interesting or important here beyond what engineers can discover in their spare time. Nobody should bother studying any of this." I'm glad there are people who disagree with you.
I never said it wasn't worth studying. Consider how arrogant it is to say that liberal arts are for teaching people how to think critically, implying that hard sciences, math, and engineering are just producing thoughtless drones for work.
I don't know of any polls, I'm simply taking into account that fact that a large percentage of college students want to go into fields which do not have high 10-year salaries, such as science, academia, journalism, literature, and politics.
1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.
2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.
3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.
4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.
5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) "top 100" universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and/or trade schools under the same umbrella of "education" and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.