As I’ve recounted in numerous past threads that I’m too lazy to look up, my math professor brother has for years been decrying the model of running large state universities as businesses. He sees more and more kids every year who, in his opinion, have no business being in college.
It used to be hard to get into college. Today, everyone gets in, but a lot bale without graduating. How good an investment was the tuition **they ** paid? Even if it wasn’t borrowed?
The result is that the mediocre student without parental guidance will not likely get much for their money. I know, because this was a good description of me when I graduated from high school. I went to college for three semesters, with no idea what I was doing. When I went back after dropping out and working for a few years, I had much more of an idea what I could get out of college.
I’m very glad I went back. My (electrical engineering) degree got me a good job, and taught me the basic skills I needed to learn how to do that job. I had researched my prospects pretty carefully beforehand, and was very lucky that I lived where in-state tuition was low enough that I graduated debt-free. I was also lucky that I graduated at a time when employers were hiring.
I think part of the problem is a shallow vanity people place on having a college degree, or more accurately, on their kid’s having a degree. I would rather be a competent blue-collar person than someone whose greatest achievement was a degree I sqeaked through with no interest or clue what to do with.
College may not be a scam. But if you go into it without proper preparation and planning, it may feel like one. IMO the system is less forgiving today than it was a few years ago, when it would flunk out such a person and make him face his options instead of loading him up with debt.
The problem with this is that college is way too expensive to “have the time of your life” at. Bankrupting yourself so that you can talk about the frat parties you went to isn’t my idea of a wise investment. I know people who came out of 4 year private liberal-arts colleges $80-100,000 in debt and could only find work as a secretaries or in retail sales.
As someone with 3 college degrees, of course I say college is worth it IF (and it’s a big one) it trains you to do an actual job. Sorry, but it’s too expensive nowadays to get an education for its own sake. If you want that, take some courses at your community college.
And for the love of God (and out of respect for your parents’ hard-earned $$) PLEASE do NOT major in
Music
Film
Art
English
Poli Sci (without intending to go to Law School)
History
Anything with “Studies” after the name
unless you are absurdly talented or independently wealthy, OR want to be a well-educated barista at Starbucks.
College education is not a scam. It does, however, get marketed in some scammy ways, especially to students who are not particularly savvy about how the system works.
College is not trade school. Students who want it to be a trade school are likely to end up frustrated and disappointed, because honestly, most colleges don’t do job training very well or very efficiently. Good colleges, however, do an excellent job creating educated, reflective, culturally and scientifically literate citizens who can read, write, and think critically – which is a much harder task. The bachelor’s degree is a marketable credential because many employers happen to value employees with these qualities, but the education that fosters them is not, ultimately, for the employer. It’s for the student. It is inalienable and intrinsically valuable.
The problem is that colleges don’t always succeed in cultivating these qualities. Sometimes that is the student’s fault, and sometimes it’s no one’s fault. As a rule, people get no more out of their education than they put into it, and some students are lazy, or apathetic, or unready for college, or unable to concentrate on their education because they have other, more pressing things going on in their lives. And sometimes it’s the college’s fault. Plenty of colleges do a lousy job providing the kind of education they ought to provide. Some value research more than teaching, some have succumbed to the job-training mindset themselves, and some are driven by tuition and will gladly take money, semester after semester, from students who shouldn’t be there in the first place. (I believe that colleges with low admissions standards do a grave disservice to their students unless they are ruthless about weeding out the ones who won’t make it within the first semester or two. It’s brutally unfair to keep taking tuition money from a student who is not intelligent enough to grasp abstract ideas or think critically, and unconscionable to dumb down the classes so that large numbers of such students can get through by memorization alone, while their brighter classmates stagnate.) These colleges are, arguably, running a scam. But that doesn’t mean the system is inherently scammy, any more than investment banking or state government or any other institution vulnerable to corruption is a scam.
College didn’t “train me to do an actual job.” Neither did law school, actually. But college did train me to read critically, write carefully, and respect and understand a wide range of ideas and perspectives I wouldn’t otherwise know much about. Pick a college that matches your style and goals. I could never have survived at a big state University. Others have trouble at small liberal arts schools. My four years at college changed my life. I’d do it all over again, even it I only turned out to be a “well educated barista at Starbucks.”
Colleges have done theselves no favors in the long run by making a college degree so easy and so painless to earn. Sure, in the short run, they’ve brought in a few more tuition bucks but at the cost of undermining their “product”: a degree that warrantees its holders are capable of sophisticated thought.
The worst thing that colleges’ high retention rates (that they’re very dissatisfied with) have done is to produce huge numbers of college graduates who can’t write or think. If I were hiring, I’d damned sure do my own testing to make sure the college grads I was hiring had basic skills.
For me, college worked out pretty well. Me with 3 years of an art degree = working two min wage jobs. Me with a social work degree = stable, salaried positions, maybe a little low-paid to the majority of Dopers, but still a good living for me and mine.
A lot of jobs only require a B.S., but not in any subject. For those jobs, any of the ones you listed would be fine. For example, my wife is an elementary school teacher. She has a B.S. in Art, as well as a Teaching Credential.
College education certainly worked out well for myself, as an engineer. In my working life I’ve already earned 30 times what my college cost me, and I’m only in my mid 40s.
The number of a class isn’t always a good indication of its difficulty, or even its difficulty as rated by the college. I’m taking a senior-level linguistics course, but it’s not terribly hard. Conversely, my freshman engineering courses were my biggest pains in the ass so far, just ahead of physics. Man, I’m glad I changed majors.
The problem with college is perception. This perception is created by the colleges (who sell you the dream of “earn your degree and you are set for life”), and is swallowed by society at large.
I have done plenty of hiring in my day, and I quickly learned that I could care less about a BA and in some cases, even a Masters degree. I did my fair share of hiring people with degrees that couldn’t find their ass with a flashlight when it boiled down to getting work done and doing it right. Just absolute morons (but with a degree). I fired them all of course.
I agree that if you are going into medicine, law and such other professions, college is a must. For everyone else (should I say, the greater percentage of our population?), it is a waste of time and money. You are better off working straight out of high school. You will have what many BAs don’t.
Work experience that may give you an idea of what you actually would LIKE to do for the rest of your life
Work experience that is invaluable to any employer (much more than a degree)
Money (hopefully save some) and then MINUS debt.
Dont have kids yet, but I have every bit of mind to tell them “If you think I am paying to send you to a four year party so you can then figure out how and what to do with your life, you are shit out of luck. You are going to work (with or without going to college at the same time), and if it serves a true purpose to your desired career path, I will pay for your college gladly”.
Bottom line: Many of those who go to college shouldnt. College is overhyped in most cases. It is WAY TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE. Trade schools should be a better fit for most. Associates degrees are more than enough for some. Absolutely NOTHING is better than working your way to the top.
Reference: Of all my brothers/sisters & cousins, I am the only one that didn’t do college (I tried for six months and realized it was highschool all over and dumped it like a rock). Amongst my kin there are Doctorates, BAs (of every flavour), Masters, etc. You name it. I currently make more that any of those guys do. Also regularly beat all their asses at trivia and scrabble - so I don’t feel too bad about missing out on the whole college experience.
People who think that college will be a waste of time are probably right.
College is not for everyone.
College has social opportunities that can be fun and lucrative in the long term, but college is not supposed to be about either.
If you know why you want to go to college, write it down and find the best college for that program and apply to that college. When you get there, do all the work before play. If you change your mind about why you went to that college, start over.
If your parents will pay for college, go (and keep going unless you can’t stand it) until you get a four year degree. It will be the time of your life.
What you should learn at college other than your subjects:
a. How to write.
b. How to think (reasoning processes, not what everyone else is thinking)
c. How to behave like an adult: opposite of frat boy
d. How to love having an open mind
e. How to appreciate the finer things before you become worm food.
Now, onto law school:
Only go to law school if you want to be a lawyer and nothing else will do.
What you will learn at law school:
How to sharpen your mind by narrowing it.
What the general principles of law are.
What law school will not do for you:
Teach you how to handle a case for a client. You will need years of practice first.
Make you a better person.
I know a lot of really smart people who didn’t go to college and didn’t need it. I also know a lot of smart people who really should have gone to college and didn’t. And I know a bunch of people who went to college and it was wasted on them.
College was a waste of time and money for me. I’ve got nearly $30k in loans and only have an Associates to show for it. An Associates in a field which (if I’m lucky) will pay me $20k a year and one that I discovered I hate. So yeah, I regret going to college but I realize that it was only a bad thing for me and works out for many many more people.
I used to assign first-semester freshmen, as their first assignment, an essay entitled “College is for Suckers,” which made essentially the case the OP’s article does.
You could hear the cognitive dissonance.
I would ask the class why they enrolled in college, and the responses were usually about 5% “to become a better person,” 45% "because if you have a degree you’ll make more money and 50% “I dunno.” The point of the essay was to explain to the 95% that if you measure strictly by dollars and cents, a college degree pays off only of you major in a handful of specific things. (And then there was the guy who said “I’m here to get drunk and have sex for four years.” After the class stopped laughing, I announced that that guy was the smartest one in class, since he at least had a definite plan).
I’ve lost track of how many freshmen I’ve counseled to go off and join the circus, and only come back when they knew what they wanted to do.
Based on what my brother tells me about his students, we need more of this kind of thing said to freshman.
Society has extended adolescence further and further, to the point where fewer and fewer kids have much contact with the workplace and where they might fit into it.
While it’s good if you have your plans in place so that you can go straight into college from high school and do well, starting college unprepared can make an intelligent person think that their failure was due to a lack of ability, and rule out college permanently.
I think a college education is one of the few things worthy of being in debt for. I escaped undergraduate school relatively unscathed, but I’m willing to face the possibility that I will come out of grad school with upwards of $60k in debt. Fortunately my husband, a Ph.D student, will not have much at all. We’ve already concocted a plan to deal with the debt immediately upon graduation. We’ll live in as cheap an apartment as we can find and pay off as much as we can every year for five years. Even if you assume I pull in $36k (what I’m making now) and my husband pulls in $50k (not an unreasonable salary for a psychologist), we’ll be able to pay off at least $10k a year. So in 6 years we’d be debt free.
THEN we could buy a house.
What’s that? We don’t give a shit about living in an apartment until we’re 35? No, we really don’t. Our quality of life has done nothing but increase since we started college and I’m perfectly content with my current income. It gives us plenty of leeway to have fun and we’ve got some nice stuff. It’s awesome that it will only get better.
I’m not even sure how two people can have $175k of debt. I strongly suspect not all of that is student loans – or in the very least, not necessary student loans. While signature loans can have a high interest rate and may be difficult about payback, student loans in general are one of the easiest kinds of debt to work with. In many cases people are able to re-negotiate the terms of their loan without hassle. When I was temporarily unemployed, all I had to do was push a button asking for a 12 month forebearance, and I got it. Maybe that’s too much for some people with bad decision-making skills to handle, but I don’t see why we should blame that on the entire loan industry and every university who encourages loans.
I really feel bad about people who think of their college education as a waste. I feel bad and I don’t even really know what to say. I’m sorry. My experience was incredible and worth almost anything. I graduated 2nd in my class in high school and didn’t know a damn thing until I came to college. Attending university was kind of like walking up to your attic door and discovering the whole universe was behind it. All this stuff in my head I didn’t know was there, all these ideas, all these opinions and drives and goals and passions. I would pay them every day for the rest of my life if that’s what it took to get what I got.
Graduate school is often more of a scam than undergrad - particularly in liberal arts majors where it prepares you for too few college level teaching jobs.
I, however, do have my first degree in Film, minor in History and Women’s Studies - and did darn well with it - both in salary and career opportunities. It did help me learn to think (although I was ok at it already) and write (I was ok at that as well) and I have had one of those jobs which doesn’t require a specific degree. I’ve never pulled a double venti decaf latte in my life. Liberal arts degrees are not necessarily a dead end, they are just a hidden path - if you manage to find a hidden path (not easy) and one that doesn’t just peter out - liberal arts degrees can be rewarding - both personally and financially.
But all college degrees are a little like playing roulette with a lot of money - a law degree is no guarantee of a high paying job in the end - I know a lot of bottom of the class lawyers barely making ends meet. Four years in medical school doesn’t mean you’ll be able to get through residency and actually tolerate being a doctor (although I think doctors are pretty employable because they don’t produce too many of them - unlike lawyers). There are waiters with MBAs.
Prezactly. The goal (for me, anyway) is a well-rounded education resulting in a better understanding of the world and a generally more enriched life experience. A better gig should theoretically come as a result of that.
I hear so many stories of people who have paid through the nose for an education and then don’t find work (or don’t like the work) in their chosen field.
