If you do some kind of investment (say, in stocks of some company), you first read up on investment, the market this company works in, products this company is planning etc. in particular if you go in debt for this investment.
So why can't one simply expect from grown-up people to do the same for the degree that ones planes do get?
The parents may be more experienced, but they are, for the most part, just as naive.
They grew up in a world where a bachelor's degree - any bachelor's degree - virtually guaranteed at least a middle class lifestyle, if not an upper middle class one. Many of them can't fathom the idea of graduating from college and then not being able to find a job that pays a living wage. Especially the ~2/3 of them who don't hold bachelor's degrees themselves.
> Many of them can't fathom the idea of graduating from college and then not being able to find a job that pays a living wage.
It is not only about finding a job (I believe with a "sensible" degree you will always find one), but about finding a job that pays well enough so that beside the costs of living (which are enormous in some regions) also the college debts can be paid back in a reasonable time.
There is no workable definition of "sensible" here. A number of my friends graduated with journalism degrees in 2007. They couldn't find jobs in journalism. This probably seems obvious to you now, that journalism is not a "sensible" degree, but in 2002-2004 when we were choosing schools and degrees, every major city had two or more competing newspapers with healthy entry level hiring. The world changed. That happens. It is happening to some set of degrees right now, but we don't yet know what they are. Maybe computer science degrees will not be "sensible" in 2021.
My point is just that a solution to this problem that requires teenagers and their parents to accurately predict the future of a complex society is not actually a solution at all.
On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore the financials. It's not about "useful vs useless." All courses of study are useful. People are getting saddled with piles of debt that they can't manage, though, and US law doesn't allow you to declare bankruptcy from your student loans, so people can potentially end up screwed for life. Against that kind of a backdrop, to blithely charge students whatever tuition they're willing to pay, regardless of whether or not they can expect to be able to pay it, is heartless.
So then the question arises, how do you increase the chances that nobody gets shackled with unmanageable debt for life? Changing the earning power conferred by different majors is a possibility. But, capitalism being what it is, that's going to require either changing the demand for those skills, or changing the supply of people who have those skills. It's hard to imagine how the former can be managed without some sort of government subsidy.
There are myriad ways you could affect the supply side, though. Doing something to put universities on the hook for how much their students earn, such as having students pay a % of their income to their alma mater for a decade or two in lieu of all or part of their tuition, would certainly do it. Universities would hopefully respond by starting to limit the number of seats available in departments that feed into less lucrative career paths right quick, in order to make sure that every department is financially sustainable. That would, in turn, reduce the supply of people with those skills, which would translate into an upward trajectory in how much it costs to hire someone with those skills.
But what is that kind of approach, if not a distinctly capitalist riff on the idea of "delineating useful vs. useless degrees"?
I keep wanting to reply to your comment because it's a good one that seems like it deserves more than just an upvote. But I also don't want to take the time to write the kind of response you deserve. So I'm leaving this meta comment just to let you know you weren't shouting at the wind and to thank you for your thoughts, which I found very interesting.
I mean this is why you have Asian immigrant parents insisting that the only acceptable areas of study are premed, prelaw, and (more recently) engineering. Some will refuse to pay for tuition unless their children agree.
(I think there's a famous anecdote by Bobby Jindal where his father told him that he could be anything he wanted to be -- any kind of doctor that is)
This is also the kind of environment that I am used to. Even though university education is mostly free in Germany, there are still costs of living etc. Thus there exist quite some children whose parents are quite hesitant to pay for the education of them if they don't agree with the degree course that the child chooses - even though by law they are typically required to pay.
Parents are required to support their children into their adulthood in Germany? That doesn't sound likely, but then, I'm not German.
Edit: found a reference that says parents must support children until they are 21 or have a profession to support themselves (presumably whichever is sooner -- I hope!).
> Parents are required to support their children into their adulthood in Germany? That doesn't sound likely, but then, I'm not German.
> Edit: found a reference that says parents must support children until they are 21 or have a profession to support themselves (presumably whichever is sooner -- I hope!).
if the child studies at a university, the parents have to pay for them until it gets its master's degree (which is typically much longer than up to the 21 years of age). There are exceptions, such as if the parents can prove that the child does not concentrate on his studies or if it changes the degree course "too often" etc. But assume that the normal case is that the parents have to support the child up to master's degree.
Neither of my parents went to college. I actually missed filling out FAFSA my first year because I didn’t even know it existed. I took the SAT late for a similar reason (I knew it existed but I though you take it your senior year of high school). The parents of first generation college attendees are ill equipped to help. Their advice was effectively go to some college at all costs.
So why can't one simply expect from grown-up people to do the same for the degree that ones planes do get?