If you went to law school and didn’t learn how to work as an attorney, then I think you’re owed a refund.
No arguement that as part of a university education that you learn to read critically and write carefully. The problem is , you need other skills to go with those. They are important, no doubt, but you need more, that’s all I’m saying.
And I think you would not be a happy person at all if you were deep in debt and could only find work at Starbucks.
Depends what you want to study. Are there jobs out there for that level of training in your field?
I agree with those posters who feel the article is rather sensationalist. I always get suspicious when incomplete financial information is provided, such as for the couple with $194k of debt. By not providing the years over which their $145k in payments were made, it is hard to assess what is really going on. Perhaps this couple is more interested in driving fancy new cars than paying down their student debt?
Of course, it makes a more exciting article to claim the whole system is broken and dysfunctional, rather than to focus on the spendthrift ways of a couple of “educated professionals”.
On a more general note, I think a lot of students need to recalibrate their expectations. Given that an increasing percentage of the population holds a degree, graduating in the bottom half of your class with a less-than-fully-marketable degree will not get you too far.
When I graduated from college I worked in billing for a fortune 500 energy company. My #1 goal was to find a place where I could be up front about the fact that I was starting a business and intended to leave as soon as we had the revenue to support me full time. I left after four months, and only because I had committed to at least four.
Virtually everyone in my group had a 4 year degree, even though there was absolutely no reason for it. It was mind-numbing perfunctory work for a mid-30,000 salary and even years later I can`t decide for sure what it means that they all needed degrees to get the job. My suspicion is that there’s an ongoing educational creep where one needs an extremely expensive degree just to get increasingly menial jobs that lack an intrinsic demand for the higher education.
Bottom line: if I had spent all that time and money on a degree and I wound up billing industrial electricity customers all day, I sure would have felt scammed.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Not only is this wrong, but it’s insulting.
I found this book an interesting discussion of some of the flaws in today’s higher education, and why college is not - and ought not be - for everyone.
It’s interesting - though scarcely surprising - that the increase in the cost of a college education (in real dollars) goes hand-in-hand with the rise in student loans. As compared to 30 years ago, todays students are paying about twice as much (inflation-adjusted) for the same degree.
It’s easy to see how the colleges benefitted from vast billions in loans; it’s harder to see how the students - or the country - did.
I have to say that looks like a compelling read. And it appears to offer a more nuanced position than ‘‘higher education is a scam.’’
I agree that higher education is no longer a sure-fire way to bring home a fat paycheck. I just looked up the average salary for graduates of a program I just applied to, and it’s something like $44k. My field (social work) is notorious for low pay, so I’m not terribly surprised–but this is from one of the best schools in the country. I’m happy making the somewhat paltry sum I make now, and more would be icing on the cake, but the whole point of my going to graduate school is so I can get a job doing something I’m passionate about and actually learn something unique and valuable about my field. That’s worth a whole lot more to me than a paycheck. For people like me, schooling is a good deal. If you want money, maybe we’ve reached a point where higher education isn’t the immediate best choice. I find that hard to swallow, though. It’s true that lawyers might not all be wealthy like in the good old days, but they have to be better off than the kid with only a high school diploma, right?*
*Right? My grandfather got an awesome job with only a high school diploma, but that was in the 50s. It seems like every decent job nowadays requires at least a BA.
Also, from observing some of my more artistic friends I absolutely agree that a degree in the arts can bring a heap of frustration. If you really love acting/singing/dancing/whatever, if it’s the thing that drives you, if you don’t mind living paycheck to paycheck for the honor of spending your life doing that thing, then more power to you. But statistically it’s unlikely you’re going to make a lot of money this way. I’ve got one friend who graduated with her BA in theatre who works retail and lives with her parents while she works on small community projects (which she seems to genuinely enjoy.) I’ve got another friend who double majored in Theatre and Political Science who auditioned for a bunch of shit and lived the life of a vagabond for a while and is now considering Law School. Another is a double major in Biology and Creative Writing. He recently went down to part-time at an Aquarium (his wife supports them both with her engineering degree) and is spending his extra time trying to make a living with his art. I guess my point is, if you have a passion, great! But never underestimate the value of a backup plan.
got some stats to back that up? 
You can be a very well-educated barista at Starbucks.
Well, this is anecdote, admittedly. But everyone I know who majored in a liberal arts such as the one listed managed to get a very nice job that he/she would not have been able to get without a college degree. Sure, the job may not be in the particular field of the degree, but still the college educatoin was worth it.
I’ve already mentioned my wife, with a degree in Art, now a teacher. Another person I know with a degree in History, now a regulatory manager for a pharmaceutical company. (She coordinates the volumes of paperwork between her company, the contracted testing labs, and the FDA. It’s fairly specialized and pays pretty well.)
Ed
It may be that the benefits of a college education cannot be summed up by a single measure such as a future-earnings-multiplier. A person’s lifetime output of “useful stuff” may be measured in ways other than, “managed to figure out how to make LCD displays 3 mm thinner, saving company X $2.5 million over the course of Y years.”
Additionally, there are successful people who succeeded wildly in life without a college degree (or even a high school diploma). Maybe they’re geniuses, maybe they’re already able to prioritize things, maybe they’re already able to think critically and make decisions that are both efficient and groundbreaking. Maybe they faced and overcame complex problems that don’t fit neatly into a mutiple choice test. Maybe they have great communications skills and a strong work ethic.
But I had few of these qualities coming out of high school, and college is where I learned many things, including things that I hadn’t even known I needed to know.
If a prospective student thnks that history is an important subject or that it seems to encompass coursework that he or she thinks is valuable, why not major in history? They should be made aware of some objective statistics about the current or past earnings of history majors, but lifetime earnings may not be what they think is most important. Who am I to judge?
This doesn’t mean the student should expect support from their parents if their parents think that way, and it would probably benefit them to know that there will be some challenges if they choose to consider more than money in their list of priorities.
It may be that if a bunch of people are sitting around a table discussing a thorny issue involving their business or politics or anything else, the perspectives of people with degrees in history, english, African studies and poli-sci may enable the group to imagine a better way to address said issue.
If a student is paying their own way or if his or her parents can afford it and agree, they should study anything they want. Again, they make the decision with their eyes open, but they have a right to that decision.
As I’ve noted in other threads, one of the incredible benefits I received in college was due to my having to work part time for pretty much the entire duration. That allowed me to try out about a dozen jobs doing things in fields which I was considering; it also made me aware, through the entire time I was there, that college was costing me a lot of money, and that I should try to get as much out of it as I could. “Future earnings” were part of the equation, though since I chose to get a degree in physics, it obviously wasn’t the only consideration.
There’s also the issue of “degree inflation.” Sorry; many companies will exclude people from consideration if they don’t have a college degree. I didn’t make these rules and they’re not fair when applied Indiscriminately. However, in my job, I frequently feel like I’m running down the highway as fast as I can, and all sorts of things are hitting me and I have to make decisions very quickly, even if they’re somewhat sub-optimal. “First fit” tends to beat “best fit” in many circumstances, and if someone is looking for a way to discard the job applications of as many people as possible for the few openings they have and the small amount of time they have, their risk of overlooking a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is not that high.
Also, I may be full of crap. When I took out student loans ($153K in today’s dollars), they were subsidized by the government, held at a low interest rate (some as small as 4%), and colleged hadn’t inflated their costs to currently-absurd levels. It was an incredibly easy decision for me to see that college was going to be worth the debt, but the decision in today’s environment might be more difficult.
For most of you college is an apprenticeship. It is about money. But the college experience can be much more. I know college grads who have not read since college. But at least in school they were introduced to great literature and higher ideals. It hopefully rubbed off.
College is way over priced though. It has evolved into an incredibly profitable business.
And yet almost everyone who went to law school who later went on to be a lawyer seems to agree with this. You learn what the law is generally about in law school, not how to practice in courts and represent clients.
I have a bachelor’s degree. I was useless to me in learning how to be a bachelor.
Hear, hear. Reading this thread hasn’t convinced me that college is a scam, but has convinced me that a lot of college students are absolute morons. Someone who thinks college is something to be tolerated in order to be successful without doing any work is an idiot. You know, the kind of person who only cares about learning what’s on the test.
The difference between high school and college is that high school teachers are primarily teachers, while professors at a good college are primarily people in a field who also teach. They can tell you why that boring stuff you have to learn really is important.
Plus, anyone who just wants to get enough out of college to land a job is going to be unemployed 5 or 10 years later. I use almost no facts I learned in college 35 years ago. What I do use is what I learned about collecting information, thinking logically, and putting it together.
What do you mean by “know what they wanted to do?” If you mean the field they are going in, I’d say you are asking too much. Why is it impossible for someone to be exposed to something in college which excites them, and makes them change what they want to do? Do you expect them to know all the possibilities when they get out of high school? If you mean whether or not they are ready to actually learn things, then I agree.
This is a great thread. I’m actually doing a webinar on this very topic in a few weeks, so I’ll probably contribute some thoughts to the thread.
I agree with those who look at a college education as a vocational certification. It’s not. For that experience, I recommend tech school. The purpose of a college education is not to get you a great job. It’s not designed that way at traditional four year colleges, and it never was. It’s a place where you will acquire the hard and soft skills that are applicable and amenable to many fields of endeavor. This is why a theatre major can end up as a manager in a bank, or an English major can work as a technical writer for an engineering firm (true life examples that I know of).
College really is one of those things that you get as much out of as you put in. In my graduate program, I have students from very famous and wealthy schools, and those from schools you’ve likely never heard of. But I cannot give an assessment of their skills and talents from where they went to school, alone. None of us are immune to the signaling effect of a college education, especially from an elite school. But at the same time, graduates of colleges like Eureka can go on to be president of the United States (Ronald Reagan). Clearly, the degree worked for him. (I wouldn’t say that it was the only or most important thing, but it shaped him in significant ways.)
Economist Gordon Winston thinks part of the problem is that we often try to apply the “firm” model to higher education, when in reality it behaves nothing like a traditional business. Where else does a business sell its product at a discount (virtually nobody pays full freight for a college degree because of subsidies, which are mostly invisible to the student), looks at automation as a indication of poor quality (nobody wants to be taught by a video of a world-class professor, given the opportunity to learn from him/her directly), is difficult to scale up (how do you replicate a brilliant researcher or teacher?), and most of the capital is wrapped up in people (the greatest costs for most colleges are faculty salaries)?
Likening the college experience to a commodity may have increased access to higher education (specifically, at a time when the financial rewards to blue collar work were not as distant, or in some examples, even surpassed that of college graduates) but it has birthed a generation of citizens who believe college is primarily about securing a paycheck. The paycheck is an auxiliary result of what colleges do, though.
There are some basic rules of thumb that apply: go to the best school that you can afford, don’t trade on the assumption that if it’s expensive, it must be good (believe it or not, some colleges increase their tuition and see the number of applications rise). College is more like a piece of gym equipment. Sure, you’ll probably get better definition if you use the most expensive Nautilus system, but you can get buff and in great shape with a bench from Costco if you work hard at it. Conversely, simply having access to the Nautilus is not going to turn you into Charles Atlas.
Hello Hippy - That is a great analogy. I will most likely use it in the future… with your permission, of course.
I’m with those who think that education is getting to be too emphasized, to the detriment to us all. Sure, there’s value in it, but why should we ‘have’ to go to college to get a good job? Especially since there’s not much actual job training that goes on (this, of course, varies from program to program). I was in journalism school for a while–why the fuck do I need a four-year degree for that? Especially considering you could get the same basic education in one year at the same school, provided you already had a degree. Most of the first three years was spent on unrelated things. Why spend three years when the core courses could easily be taught in one? Some of my teachers didn’t go to college themselves–when they started, journalism schools didn’t exist. Why do I need a degree if they didn’t?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I went to college–if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I’m happy with being here. But the pressure to go, the expectation that you will…I think we need to back off. Let us grow up first, then send us to college. It’s not for everyone, and I highly doubt it’s near as necessary as we’re lead to believe. We only need it because we think we need it.
I don’t buy the “college isn’t for everyone” argument, because in practice that ends up being “college is for rich people and trade school is for poor people.” When the image includes the not-too-bright sons and daughters of privilege hacking it out in welding school, I’ll adjust my point of view.
I do think college costs need to be reigned back in, and a good place to start would be stripping the “country club” aspect out. But I suspect there are other, greater, costs lurking. There is just no way any sort of real costs could be rising so quickly, or that the difference between community college and 4-year college costs represent anything going on in the classroom.
Anyway, like most things in life, college is a mix of what you put into it and what you want out of it. If you don’t know what you want and you don’t put any effort into it, you won’t get much. If you have some kind of goal (even if it is an unrealistic one) and you work at it, you will probably get a lot out of it.