I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.

> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years).

I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate.

There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.

> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate

That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market.

E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong.

In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.

The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:

> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.

The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas.

College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.

We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.

I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this.

Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay.

I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.

> Maybe college never should have been for everyone?

This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that.

Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share

Quick search shows around 6% unemployment for CS grads. Where is your number from? That is massively different.

I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists.

IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago."

CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos.

Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend.

Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.

Internet universities have been available for several decades; correspondence degrees for almost a century. Sure, credentialing is a large part of students' choices to attend in-person. Yet the primary reason students attend universities in person is because most people learn best in-person, with personal interaction.

I would not be confident in underemployment figures for 2025 published this early in the year. The New York Federal Reserve has published underemployment rates from 2024 only a couple months ago [1]. In it, computer science underemployment is lower than other majors, even in the mathematical and natural sciences. Aggregated new graduate underemployment has been higher in previous decades than the current level. Underemployment is the right metric to consider because it captures people who accepted lower-skill jobs in order to support themselves.

1. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

I said this a week ago, and it swung in votes like crazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655525

“ I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free. Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.

I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book. Magical times.”

let's see the site, if we can't have a primary source

> CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone?

That's absolutely what I think, since even before the proliferation of LLMs.

Yup. I've also seen a number like that mentioned by the Moonshots podcast by peter diamantis.. they showed that quarter by quarter the placement rate for CS grads had declined every querter for the last 3 years from 93% at 91K per year down to 19% at about 65k. it was one of their last podcasts from about a week ago.

> I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years

What's the secondary source then?

> Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education.

This is the only real answer.

If college is considered a glorified high school diploma, then not having one is like not having a high school diploma.

I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities and equipment.

One example from 1985 onwards that i can think of is NSF funding of supercomputer centers. 40 years ago, SIMD / vector processors with boatloads of memory were not ubiquitous, nor were shared memory multicore / multiprocessors, a situation which differs with the reality today.

This NSF funding established the 5 supercomputing centers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Ne...

and then further downstream effects include popular access to creations from the supercomputer centers, such as Mosaic from NCSA, and an expansion of ideas outside the compuserve / aol paradigms.

I think similar situations apply for other engineering disciplines, mechanical and chemical and physics and so on. Probably true for the arts in various forms: people don't have personal pipe organs to learn Bach on, for a crazy example, but universities do.

For various industries, learning requires physical equipment too expensive for individuals, historically and still.