A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

As a millennial college graduate, my number one piece of advice to college bound high schoolers is do the first two years at community college. The debt is not worth the experience. Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out, community college is a great place to do that. I didn't even know this was an option until after college and I feel failed by my high school college advisors. Unless you are very confident in what you want to do and get into a very good college you don't think you can get into again, get a full ride, or have ridiculously rich parents, go to community college. Edit: perhaps full ride is too strict a requirement. If you can save money by going to community college, taking into account lost scholarships, you should go to community college.

Arguing in the other direction, if you mainly just need the sheepskin, this might be an unusually easy time to get one.<p>Personally, my college experience was mainly useful for discovering that my college experience wasn&#x27;t going to be very useful for me.<p>(Mildly interesting: The author seems to be this woman. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;la-verne-seeks-terminate-gadfly-professor-allegedly-threatening-assassinate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;la-verne-seek...</a>)

I generally detest the large expense of universities given the difference between what they claim to offer and the actual value. That said, the options here seem to not be any better.<p>Get a job? Fresh out of high school kidd are going to have a hard time finding gainful employment for awhile, especially in the hardest hit areas.<p>Volunteer for a political campaign? Meh. That isn&#x27;t much of a substitute, even if it has its own intrinsic value.<p>Why not encourage kids to instead look for schools that have been doing distance learning for years, or starting at a local community college instead? Its a heck of a lot less expensive (addressing the articles risk of investment point) and they are far less likely to take the money you ponied up for dormitory living while kicking you out.

Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator&#x27;s worst nightmare. They&#x27;ve all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks.<p>It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.

This seems pretty out of touch. Encouraging people to go right into the jobs market as 18yos without degrees is encouraging them to trap themselves at the (already rapidly expanding) bottom of the economic ladder, unless they&#x27;re from an already upper&#x2F;upper-middle-class family.<p>And the same goes double for encouraging degreeless 18yos to skip getting paid entirely and volunteer. That&#x27;s rich kid stuff.

I&#x27;m looking at college this fall and seriously wondering about this. I&#x27;ll have to spend a lot of money if I go to an &quot;elite&quot; school, and the point of doing that is to make connections with my peers and with professors. I don&#x27;t see the point of paying that kind of money for that sort of experience. That aside, not starting college may not be a good idea, either. Does anyone with more experience have advice on this? I do have a job at a cybersecurity firm where I&#x27;m a part-time developer, and my boss would probably convert me to full-time. I&#x27;ve also been working on some interesting side projects to learn stuff and could continue self-teaching. Does anyone with more experience have some advice for me?

There must be a lot of people thinking they won&#x27;t be getting the full experience if they start this year. I wonder if this will be the pin which pops the credit fueled runaway costs bubble?<p>Anyone who ends up not bothering with it at all will at least have great reason for not having a degree - <i>well I was all set to go to such and such, but then coronavirus, so I started work for a while instead, and just really got into the whole working hard thing...</i>

I think this is a great article, however, I think a more tempered approach may be to take online courses from a community college or similar to begin working on at least some gen eds.<p>This frees you up to do some of these other things that article suggests, while still getting credits under your belt.

Observations from overseas (Sweden): possibly because college&#x2F;university is typically (almost) free of cost and because of Sweden&#x27;s culture of continuous education, there is an increase in university enrollment applications: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sverigesradio.se&#x2F;sida&#x2F;artikel.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sverigesradio.se&#x2F;sida&#x2F;artikel.aspx</a>. I must say that I like that in times of high unemployment, the &quot;free education&quot; feature allows people to further educate themselves when there are little employment opportunities. IMO, this feature takes the risk burden (that the article is mentioning) off the individual.

If lots of smart people decide to not start then it might be easier to get in for the Fall semester if you&#x27;re less able. That is, it might be to your advantage to start college this Fall.

Here&#x27;s my take: if you get into a top engineering&#x2F;CS program, you should still go.

What we are going to see this year is a &quot;run on the colleges&quot;. Just like there were runs on the banks in the 19th century, we will now have a new phenomenon, of run on the colleges. Right now colleges are preparing for a 20% decreased enrollment for the Fall semester. Due to blog posts like this one, and generally people talking with one another, a lot of students will realize that if schools are budgeting for an 80%-year, it&#x27;s better to skip the year and come back in Fall 2021. My guess is that we&#x27;ll actually see a 40% reduction in enrollment.<p>This will not make a difference for institutions like Harvard, Yale, Stanford with huge endowment funds. But it may break the back of many a poorer college. The 2020-21 academic year is going to be very interesting...

perhaps a little bit premature advice<p>college students are not at risk to begin with - I&#x27;d recommend waiting closer to mid summer<p>it might be the best time to attend college, fewer people enrolled, getting more attention from educators etc

There was a time when school was about teaching students and not protecting the staff first.<p>Janitors can work at night. Cafeterias can be take out. Profs can be on a screen or given early retirement. I realize it is an inconvience, but how about students first for the first time in a long while.<p>We collectively are safer if the college kids are away at school and not infecting grandma.

&gt; Don’t like any candidates? Then get engaged in issue activism.<p>Recommendations to be politically active regardless of the cause and position sound rather vacuous. Or rather - sound like someone has an opinion, but not the guts to voice their opinion.<p>Anyway, the main problem is the debt issue. If students going into the first year of University (or &quot;college&quot;) did not have to pay for it, it wouldn&#x27;t be such a gamble.<p>So, here&#x27;s the political cause to pursue:<p>* Occupy your university campuses, state parliaments and governors&#x27; offices, together with existing and other incoming students, to<p>* Demand tuition-free higher education and free&#x2F;discounted housing for students, in both &quot;private&quot; and state&#x2F;federal-state-owned institutions, effective immediately. And let the federal government do some &quot;quantitative easing&quot; to pay for that - which they seem to have no problem doing ten times over to cover the financiers&#x27; losses.<p>Even in regular times, this is not an outlandish demand and not even revolutionary; it&#x27;s a meaningful but not earth-shattering reform. In these times and with the Corona crisis it is closer than usual to achievability, especially w.r.t. the potential of mobilizing students.<p>PS - If organized labor in the US had not been so week, an alliance on common demands would have been quite relevant, but at the moment it&#x27;s not a realistic recommendation.

What are the practical, social negatives of this? Will in-demand schools hold a grudge on the thousands or more of students they would have liked to have in fall 2020 and skipped? &quot;You weren&#x27;t there for us in 2020 so we think you&#x27;re better off elsewhere.&quot;<p>Not that any university should behave this way; I&#x27;m asking if any quality ones would be.

I&#x27;m not sure this fall would be a great time to work on a political campaign either, since you might not want to be meeting a lot of people in person. I guess you could improve your phone and video conferencing skills, though?<p>Giving online courses a try seems like a good idea.

If people follow that, colleges might decide to lower the entry requirements and the amount of students who join this year might be similar to the usual amount.<p>Perhaps a better approach would be to plan safe working conditions instead.

Somehow the Americans outdid themselves. Six figure debt is now the norm? Despite being completely over funded colleges still cut their important staff?

Is the best thing a new high school grad can do to become more tech literate really brush up on their &quot;Blackboard skills&quot;?

By the time it is fall, this professor&#x27;s advice will be obsolete. The death rate is already slowing down in NYC and Italy. The curve is flattened in South Korea and China, and there, many are going outside to cafes and the Han River park. San Francisco has had a grand total of 20 deaths. US is already planning to gradually reopen the economy.

I just can’t believe these friends, or folks. We can do so much better.

One thing for sure the all these colleges that was charging rates up to the stars is gonna be in a real shit storm staring now

Yup, and if you are already in college don’t enroll in new classes until at least 2021 if you can freeze tuition. It is such a ripoff to be paying for world class education and end up with some basic online courses tossed together in a hurry due to a pandemic. Not to mention missing out on the social networking aspects that college life brings.