While this is true, if the professor flunks 5 kids he probably gets to keep his job. On the other hand, if the coach loses 5 football games…
I believe you know that’s not a good analogy.
Also, you need to follow KSU football. They lose many more than 5 games every season! 
Another factor nobody mentions is the change in expectations - especially the middle class.
Growing up in the '60s, middle class was a 1200-1500 sq ft 3 bedroom/1-2 bath house, on a 1/4 acre lot. Most kids shared bedrooms with siblings.
Cars only had air conditioning in the southern states, and that cost $500 extra (big $$ on a $2500 new car). Power windows, cruise control, power locks and tail gates were only on luxury cars. Seat belts weren’t required until 1968, and air bags were unknown. On some cars, heater and radio were optional extras. Tires wore out in 20K miles, oil changes every 3K miles, and spark plugs at 12K. Chassis and wheel bearings were supposed to be greased every year.
In our models, the $2 plastic HO car kit normally had plastic wheels, plastic “junk” X2f couplers, cast on details. The low end $15 Athearn diesels had rubber band drives. Rivarossi/AHM locos had flanges too deep for anything but code 100 rail. Brass locos at $30-$60 were out of reach for somebody making $2-$3/hr, especially when they still had to be painted and made to run better. Brass rail was common, as nickel silver was very expensive, which meant cleaning the rails before every attempt to run trains.
Yet somehow we survived, and we wanted better for our children. So expectations for what was middle class went up across the board.
Fred W
…modeling foggy coastal Oregon in HO and HOn3, where it’s always 1900…
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Nope!
Maybe I shouldn’t have painted with such a broad brush and I shouldn’t have laid all the blame on high school guidance counselors. I was going by my own experiences as well as those from the generations after me. And it wasn’t just the guidance counselors who tried to steer so many to college. It was relatives, friends, society as a whole. It’s not hard to understand why so many kids got the idea that not going to college would doom them to being second class citizens. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Rush Limbaugh are just a few who would have argued that point. For that matter, Harry Truman did quite well for himself without a college degree.
I graduated high school in 1969. Tuition at Ohio State for in state students was $250 a quarter. OSU at the time was on the trimester system, which meant three periods would equal one year of a 4 year degree. One year of tuition would be $750 or $3000 for 4 years, not including books and other incidentals. Of course everyone was telling me I HAD TO go to college. I wasn’t ready to go to college and had no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to take a gap year but everyone was telling me that would be a big mistake. No one ever explained to me why the colleges wouldn’t still be there if I took a year or two off. I ended up going right into college and it was the biggest mistake of my life. Going to college just because everyone else said I should wasn’t much of a motivating factor and I ended up dropping out in the middle of the spring trimester.
I worked a few odd jobs for the next few years, none of which had a career path. Finally in 1976, I entered a trade school to learn to program main frame computers. I did pretty well and landed a good paying job for which there was much demand. There were a couple occasions in my career in which not having a 4 year degree became a roadblock. When I hit one of those situations, I just made a lateral move and kept moving up. Toward the end of my career, I moved into management and had 8 college graduates working under me.
I spent decades dealing with young people coaching sports. I would never bring the subject up but if they brought up the subject of whether they should go to college or not, I would tell them to make their own decision about that. It’s OK to listen to the advice of others, but don’t let them make the decision. Everyone’s situation is different and they alone have to decide what the best course is for their life. If they make a mistake, it’s never too late to change course. It wasn’t for me when I dropped out of college.
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It’s been my experience in dealing with universities there are two main reasons college costs have outpaced inflation:
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The hiring of student assistants, adjunct teachers, and graduate assistants to teach classes, with full professors having less contact with students. (In some cases, fewer professors were hired. In some cases, the professors had classroom time cut, with their time being switched to research to bring in grant money.)
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The large increase in university administrators.
I’ll try to find some numbers to back up what I believe, but I’m also old, feeble-minded, and likely wrong. 
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Nope, you are not wrong. I think both are typical factors. Even at colleges where emphasis is on teaching, the number of tenure track professors is stagnant while numbers of adjuncts grew to keep pace with enrollment numbers and cut costs.
A formal education is something you need if you wish to have a career in a field that requires it. A formal education is something that is needed for those that lack the critical thinking skills required to move forward on their own. There is no right or wrong, however, if you you are not a self starter and don’t want to spend your life in a low paying job complaining about the cost of things instead of just going out and making more money, then you had better get that ticket. We all know educated people in high paying positions that really have no business being there.
Just how an automobile should be–and with a manual transmission, too! Though, up here, a heater is mandatory.
Or more likely, critical thinking skills are needed for higher education. Very few people in the last 50 years get far without at least some formal education (K-12).
The rest of your post is rather incomprehensible or the mutterings of envy.
You omitted the roller bearing ashtrays.
Some, of course, but some higher education is almost entirely a prereq for entry into the better paying career tracks except for some trades and OTR trucking.
There is more to satisfaction with careers than pay. Ask some of the teachers on here, like NKP and York among others
My perspective is from the Philadelphia area. If you lose a game on Sunday the hammers appear on Monday; the nails show up on Tuesday; the lumber is delivered on Wednesday,; and the carpenters arrive Thursday morning.
Most of us know what happens on Friday.
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If that’s how it should be, I hope you’re not in an accident. And you neglected to say how wonderful it was with thiose cars getting 10 mpg.
In my day, the whole point of a ‘liberal arts college education’ was to learn the right coordination of critical thinking skills, including those which ‘autodidacts’ would never experience – or learn the wisdom of without hard later experience.
Of course, even then, “college” could easily be high-school-plus-two-years followed by graduate-school-minus-two-years, with little or no actual ‘learning ways of thinking’. And the lion’s share of any technology you studied in college will probably be long obsolescent by now… if in fact it wasn’t already obsolescent or worse by the time you paid to learn it.
In liberal arts curricula back then you developed/honed thinking skills by studies, readings and writing papers
That works for some. Others gain insight and wisdom without external grading and acknowledgement of achievements. Vox alphabet soup, vox humbug.
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College or university and higher isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But the green-eyed monster raised its ugly head.
Lots of memories there. Thanks.
I’m a contemporary of yours and I concur. I remember all that you do as well. Luckily I had a job in 1982 that was pretty secure if not high paying.