I disagree - for 150 years there have been scholarship programs for students who don’t have money.
Granted, someone who is rich can buy their stupid kid a college education (and that’s where the problem has really come in - our middle class now feels entitled to everything the rich have - designer clothes, expensive cars, yearly vacations, huge houses with granite countertops and liberal arts degrees for Missy, who isn’t too bright, but can get through an Art History course and might find a husband while she is there) - while the poor kid actually has to have talent. But life isn’t fair.
Why does that have to be the practice? Couldn’t it be that a traditional liberal arts college education is for people who excel at such things as verbal and written communication?
Maybe engineering, architecture, or “trade schools” are for people who excel at spatial relationships or science/math?
The unfortunate thing is that so many employers have assumed that a BA is the default minimum requirement, even when an apprenticeship or other industry-specific training might actually be more useful in training and preparing potential employees. So what we need is to shift the perspective where everyone - students, employers, school administrators - agree that different people have different strengths and learn in different ways, and that a standard 4-year undergraduate program is not the best for everyone.
I’m working on my masters degree in public policy at the moment, and while my undergrad degree is not in poli sci, MANY of my classmates’ are. A lot of them did, in fact, have political jobs before returning to school - they worked as aides for congresspeople, as lobbyists, as campaign strategists, for the GAO - all kinds of political jobs. Eventually, though, they found that for a lot of careers, a higher degree was necessary and that is why they’re back in school.
IMO, college is only a scam if what you want to do doesn’t require a college degree. The career I want pretty much always requires a masters degree in economics, policy, or international development. So here I am. I do not feel as though I am being scammed (although I do feel quite poor).
The age-old debate of the utility of a classic liberal arts education goes back to the Yale Report of 1928, and probably further than that. The answer is there - college is not necessarily about mastering Greek or Latin, but more about learning to think, learning how to approach a topic that’s unfamiliar and gaining an understanding of said topic, and of course interacting in an intellectual community. College graduates are attractive because part of the experience is learning how to think and process information, a valuable skill in virtually every field of endeavor. Not only that, perhaps you see a link between Hamlet’s inability to make a decisive action in the play and current events, like a local pol’s wavering on a key issue. It might make your article that much more interesting to read.
Anybody who dismisses a degree in any field because they assume that the degree is only applicable to that narrow field is quite mistaken. I suspect within a year, your profs and advisers have made it quite clear that jobs in the specific fields are scarce, and you’ll know what people with your degree ultimately end up doing. I have an honors interdisciplinary degree with an odd name known only to people in academia, but graduates from my program end up in every career field imaginable - from advertising to high tech to consulting to journalism… you name it, there’s someone doing it.
If your leading argument is “I majored in theatre, and that’s all I know and can do,” well, you’ve pretty much painted yourself in a corner.
To follow along with the “college as a piece of gym equipment” analogy, I have referred to paying for college as the equivalent of paying for a gym membership. Paying tuition opens the door for opportunities to learn, but the student has to put effort in, and the amount of effort put in will create the outcome. This is my stock response to students who complain to me that they’re “paying for this class!” so of course they should receive a particular grade.
I tell them that if they paid for a gym membership, but didn’t go or didn’t use the equipment provided when they did go, or just sat on the equipment with no effort, they wouldn’t get the body they wanted. Just like paying for a gym membership doesn’t guarantee you the body you want without effort, paying for college doesn’t guarantee you a grade or an education you want without effort.
Right, I kept waiting for “But then neither could find jobs,” only wait—they found pretty good jobs?! Devote one salary purely to paying off the debt and it should be retired in 5 years tops.
12% for a student loan? I knew people whogot loans at 2 or 3% IIRC. If that’s really the going rate, the old thinking about it being money well borrowed needs some recalculations.
But that issue aside, right, re: fancy new cars and all. Of course, who knows—maybe they hit some huge medical bills or something else derailed them. If that’s the case it’s unfair to omit it from the description. If two people earning $200K combined can’t pay back their loans, who can? This leaves me :dubious:
College was the best money I ever spent (props to my parents…we went 50/50). I changed majors once but I knew that I would earn a degree and I did. I partied, sure, but I didn’t blow off classes or fail to study. I got good grades, won some awards, and made it. But I knew many students who weren’t nearly that diligent.
There was a thing on 60 Minutes or some other news mag long ago about how sooo many teens graduate high school and don’t know what they want to do. Given a choice between work and more school, they choose school. They take a year, bomb out, and go to work (then default on the student loan, which was the upshot of the piece).
IMO right now we’re holding the dogs at bay WRT the economy. So many jobs have already been shipped out, the Big Three have taken a beating, bailing out Wall Street, etc. etc. etc. Talking to people I know who run businesses, it sounds like they’re slashing workforce by 30, 40, 50%. Someone on TV estimated it will be 10 years before we recover. Meanwhile there will always be the who-wants-them jobs, like flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wally, but how many good ones?
My parents were both union, blue-collar, and raised ten kids. How many of those jobs now exist for the applicant pool—the kind that allow you the paycheck to own a home, raise kids and have two cars in the garage yadda without requiring something beyond a high school diploma? A four-year liberal college may not be the answer for everybody but some kind of training beyond high school would be in my kid’s future if I had a kid.
Seems like all the respondents are college educated.
I quit high school after 10th grade, as I felt it was a waste of time. I have never regretted the decision. Passed the GED no problem, not that it mattered. No one has ever asked to see my high school diploma. I attended a prestigious school 1-10th grade and received a good education.
I went to work full time at 17, apprenticed to a master craftsman. Married at 19, owned my own business at 20, father at 21, again at 23 and bought a house at 23. I am now 46. House is paid for, 3 vehicles all paid for, bought the house next door to rent out. By the time I am 60 I will own at least 2 more outright. The rent will allow me to retire.
I work hard (ceramic tile and stone), used to have 14 employees but didn’t like it much. Now it’s just myself and my son (he did finish high school but saw little point in it, lives at home and has saved $100,000 at age 22 by working for me). His older brother is an unemployed electrical engineer (never liked physical labor). I love physical labor and I am quite fit and highly skilled. Although I only do tile and stone, I have taught myself anything I desire. I have done all the work on my own house (roof, huge additions, bathrooms, stonework, storage sheds, tree cutting, etc.)
I work 8am to 3pm, 4 days a week on average. I have an awesome sports car that I enjoy working on and taking long drives in. I don’t have a boss. I work all over the area and meet lots of people. We do high end custom work quite often and my skill continues to grow even after 29 years.
I am not a braggart, I am humble and a bit shy. The above statements make me out to be a total jerkwad. Despite all of the above achievements, I am often treated as subhuman because I work construction and my work clothes have grout on them. The blue collar workers in America are viewed as deficient losers who, through lack of intelligence and determination, could not achieve the strata of life fulfillment and grace where college educated people reside. Fact is, the wealthy blue collar artisans enabled our democracy to shake off the English aristocracy and allow the rule of the common man. Looks like we are going backwards.
Is college a scam? If it is, the entire society has bought right into it and views it as a “weeder class”. Those who attend, here is a pedestal, those who don’t here is a shovel.
Just to speak to the money making part of a college degee…
I have 5 siblings. I am the only one with a college degree. I have always made far less money per year than any of them. One of my brothers dropped out of H.S. when he was 16. He makes twice as much money per year, working for the railroad, as any of the rest of us do.
I didn’t use my degree(teaching) well and have only subbed here and there. I chose other lines of work, for the most part. Most of my friends are working in jobs that are totally unrelated to their college degrees, as well. For ex. my college roommate had a degree in Anthropology(another one for that list). She works for a phone company.
I am still glad I went. Just getting away from home, and learning how to live on my own was worth it. Not to mention, I had a blast.
In the minds of many (probably most) employers, there’s a perception that having a university degree would make you a far better employee than someone who doesn’t have one.
This is, by miles, the main advantage of having a degree.
Logically, it doesn’t make much sense to me. You’d think you’d hire a person based on demonstrated competency.
> Fact is, the wealthy blue collar artisans enabled our democracy to shake off the
> English aristocracy and allow the rule of the common man.
If you truly believe this, you don’t know much American history. Look, I don’t want to get into the debate on whether college is worth it, and I don’t want to get into a debate about the qualities of blue-collar and white-collar workers. My point is that what you’ve written above is a thorough misunderstanding of the American Revolution. It’s also a thorough misunderstanding of the present status of working-class people in the U.S. and the U.K.
In no way was the American Revolution started by working-class people. The leaders were all at least well off and often quite rich. Almost none of the leaders were artisans. They were owners of rich plantations or holders of white-collar jobs. Nor was there any huge difference between the American colonies and the U.K. at the time in the proportion or the status of working-class people. That wasn’t the cause in any way of the revolution. Technologically, the American colonies and the U.K. were both just at the beginning of the industrial revolution at the time. The U.K. was slightly ahead and remained so until well into the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. and Germany passed the U.K. in industrialization.
If you think that aristocracy is still important in any sense in the U.K., you don’t know anything about the U.K. Aristocracy is quite unimportant in the U.K. Indeed, it’s considerably less noticeable than celebrity culture in the U.S., which in some ways serves as our equivalent of aristocracy. Furthermore, there is less of a gap between the rich and the poor in the U.K. today than in the U.S. In fact, if you look at the difference between the pay of the heads of companies and the average workers in those companies, the difference is higher in the U.S. than in the U.K. In fact, the difference is higher in the U.S. than in pretty much anywhere else in the developed world. And, incidentally, often British aristocrats aren’t well off. They have to sell tickets to tourist to see their estates to avoid losing everything to bankruptcy.
If you have talent and a skill, you absolutely do not need a college education to make a very good living, as you yourself proved. I doubt that anybody would dispute that. I’m a college educated engineer, but I know when to defer to a plumber for his expertise.
All I can say is that while I am capable of doing jobs that require a bachelor’s degree, my lack of one keeps me from being hired for those jobs. I would love to be able to go back to college just to study subjects that interest me and maybe I will take those classes someday. Right now I just have to concentrate on being and staying employable.
What you said! I kicked myself in the butt for many years for not going to college right out of HS like most of my friends. (stupid me, I wanted the whole picket fence, kids marriage nonsense).
Like you, I made it into my industry without a degree and am making decent money. I do plan on finishing my degree, but at 50, my goal is strictly career-minded.
All of the rest of the “we need to produce well-rounded students by forcing them to take artsyfartsy classes, and life knowledge crap” is completely wasted on me. And I do think that that part of college is a scam. Some of the classes are not only useless for educational and career building, but are the purest social brainwashing to boot.
Nothing beats the school of hard knocks for excellent survival and life knowledge skills, and what passes for “art” these days, well, I don’t need an art appreciation course for me to be able to look at a pile of elephant poop and call it for the fraud it is. (though I’m glad that in my specific arts class, we got to look at good old fashioned “real” art history, facts and stuff).
A good college education comes with plenty of “hard knocks”. It ain’t easy juggling five courses plus work-study jobs plus social time plus sleeping/eating time…all well enough to keep desparately needed scholarships. If you learn how to do that, you are then ready to handle just about anything life. I graduated from college with a number of lumps on my head–all representing a different “life-relevant” lesson.
College students still have to deal with the “real world” once they get out. They aren’t being spared anything. Additionally, they learn things that the high school grad doesn’t learn. In addition to the book stuff, they learn how to navigate the world of incompetent overseers (professors), frustrating beaucracy, almost-impossible tasks (five all-nighters in a row! Yippee!!!), and nonsensicial rules. If a kid doesn’t learn how to think when they graduate, they can learn these things at least.
Plenty of people fail the school of hard knocks, and the consequences are kinda grim (being terminated, eviction, prison, death, etc.). If a person fails university, they can at least learn what they’re problems are and straighten themselves out before things take on life/death implications. As a training ground for maturity, you can’t beat college.
Just to put some reality behind these anecdotes, here are unemployment figures for last month broken down by education. It is 12% for high school dropouts, 8% for grads, 6.2% for AA degrees or some college, and 3.8% for college grads. Sure some people do fine without college, some people become NBA stars and make a fortune too. The fact is, the more education you have the safer your job, and the more you make.
Ahu Ha wonders why employers don’t look at established competency? Don’t you think making it through a difficult college with a good GPA shows at least some competency? You had to have it together in high school to get in, and in college to handle all the crap that monstro mentioned, including conflicting deadlines imposed by profs who don’t care what other profs are giving out. I assure you, it is easier to slip a deadline in industry than in college.
Sure that guy who left college or never went might have done it because he is so clever that he can do better than any college grad. It might also be because he couldn’t hack it. New grads aren’t in the same market as 20 year veterans, by the way.
Perhaps my comment on the artisan undermining of the aristocratic power was a bit broad. Certainly it is true and well known in the history of Charleston, SC that the wealth and prominence of the local artisans (silversmiths and cabinetmakers) led directly to the local undermining of British authority.
South Carolina’s elite included some of the wealthiest individuals in
North America.
Colonial South Carolina society was fluid; many of the elite had
humble origins.
The source of one’s wealth was not important during colonial
period.
a. The greatest fortunes were made by rice and indigo planters.
b. Some Charleston merchants, physicians, and lawyers also
obtained great wealth.
By the end of the colonial period, the elite was interrelated by
marriage and business partnerships.
D. The Middle Class
Charleston’s artisans – cabinetmakers, carpenters, bricklayers,
silversmiths, etc. – formed the bulk of the lowcountry’s middle
class.
Small shopkeepers, and less successful physicians, lawyers, and
teachers also were part of the middle class.
Members of the middle class could rise to become members of the
elite (examples: Henry Laurens, Daniel Cannon, and John Rose).
Quote:
Sons of Liberty made their appearance almost simultaneously, in New York and New England, but they were soon emulated in virtually every colonial town. In Boston a secret group the Loyal Nine (including a printer, a jeweler, two distillers, two braziers, and a master mariner–all employer mechanics) and another known as the Caucus, from which Samuel Adams soon emerged as the dominant figure, joined forces with those of Ebenezer Mackintosh and Benjamin Starr, shoemakers, and Isaac Bowman Apthorp, a leather dresser. They, along with a sizable contingent of maritime workers, demonstrated against unpopular British measures and intimidated officials who ventured to enforce them. In Charleston the mechanics’ leadership allied with wealthy merchants like Christopher Gadsden. In New York prosperous merchant shippers Isaac “King” Scars, John Lamb, and Alexander McDougall kept in the forefront of radical activity; but the tasks were performed by the workers themselves–men like furniture-maker Marinus Willett, by ship carpenters, and a sizable force of seamen
http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/rbmorris.htm
Quote:
If a large segment of the lower orders in rural areas defected from the Patriot cause, the reverse was true of towns wherein the action was centered. With few exceptions, the town mechanics, laborers, and seamen were either involved in the pre-Revolutionary agitation or were swept up into the Revolution. When we use the word “mechanics” we are employing a catchall covering anyone who worked with his hands, including master artisans and journeymen wage-earners (tomorrow’s master mechanics) and, even more broadly, comprehending all groups below the ranks of merchants and lawyers. Ranging from skilled and creative silversmiths and cabinetmakers to common laborers and cartmen, from master craftsmen who owned their shops and employed journeymen and apprentices to the unskilled dock workers, the “mechanics,” with their families, made up a respectable segment of the inhabitants of the major Revolutionary ports and of the smaller towns.27 Like the Parisian sans-culottes, they were "the people . . . without the frosting."28 Masters or journeymen mechanics, like so many other people of the lower and middling orders, they did not exclusively identify themselves with a single category or regard their status as permanent, any more than the American worker does at the present time.29
I used to be a civil engineer until I made a career change into technology / management consulting. While working construction sites, I would occassionally encounter a contractor who left his job as a VP in an airline or whatever industry to become a carpenter or whatever it is he was doing when I met him. At the time, it didn’t make sense to me, however now it kind of does. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from a job where you actually make something or see it made as opposed to one where you are just creating stupid analysis someone thinks will find savings somewhere. It’s frustrating working in Corporate America for many people because you are not doing anything tangible. Work is often theoretical or nebulous or so far removed from the results of the business that there really is no objective way to determine if you are doing your job well or not. That leaves people in the frustrating position of their performance being evaluated based on how well they suck up to a half-wit boss, fit in with a bunch of lazy retards or play the game.
The American university system is essentially a filter used to establish what socioeconomic class you will end up in as an adult. In the old days, it sort of made sense. My college was set up 150 years ago more or less to train management and executives for a major steel company. Generally management makes more money and has higher upward mobility than the workers so it was desirable to go to college for those opportunities. So basically college was a place to become a wealthy industrialist or for wealthy industrialists to send their kids to learn to be wealthy industrialists like them.
Somehow it seems like people have forgotten that college was for preparing you to actually do something productive and instead they have just remembered the association with greater success and affluence. You also have this phenomenon of pampered kids from families who can afford to send them, going off to college to reject the very idea of corporate industrialized society and instead becoming overeducated over-intellectualized pompous jackasses who contribute nothing but bullshit in coffeeshops.
So what we have ended up with is a tiered system where companies hire based on the traditional prestige of various universities while students attend based on some vague notion of “college = wealth and status” without any clear idea of what, if anything they want to do.
So while some kids who are relatively focused will end up in the careers they decided on prior to freshman year, others will graduate with no clear idea what they want. If those kids went to Harvard or NYU, they may find lucrative jobs at Goldman Sachs or Accenture or some management training program in a Fortune 500 company, even if they studied poetry. If they went to a run of the mill school and received average marks, they may find themselves in some sort of crappy Dilbertesque Office Space job wondering “how the hell did this happen?”
At which point they will go back to business or law school.
I am convinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with an economy where we pay six figure salaries to 20-something year old bankers, lawyers and consultants to advise experts who have managed companies for 20 years. I asked one of my 5 bosses (one of the few sensible one’s I had) when he came back from client visit how it went:
“Yeah…the guy I met with has been with his company 30 years. He started as a truck driver and worked his way up to Vice President of a multi-million dollar division in a trucking company. I’m pretty sure when I introduced him to our multi-firm team of 20-something year old “Vice Presidents” and “Directors” “Senior Subject Matter Experts” and whatever else the fuck your firms call you, he thought I had brought a team of freakin children to tell him his business and that I was probably out of my mind…and I’m pretty sure he was right.”
Well the problem is (in logical world, not crazy world), an 18 -22 year old has no track record of demonstrated competency. Assuming that you are going into a career in finance, accounting, engineering, marketing or some other job that requires half a brain, companies want to be sure you a) know the basics about what you are doing and b) have a bit of experience. That’s why internships are often so important. It also helps if they don’t have to teach you how to behave in an office setting. There is also a class element as well, as many of the top companies in their field are often very selective that their candidates come from the “right” schools.
In case it’s not clear, I don’t really buy into the idea that simply graduating from college with any old degree in anything is a valuable way to spend your time and money. It’s almost a form of elitist conspicuous consumerism. Actually studing something practical is for the blue collar prolitariet and the more practical. A true man of distinction can afford to go to the most expensive (and therefore “best”) schools to study the completely impractical.
As someone who deals with law school debt, I have to point out that, there is some extremely shady stuff being done by law schools in terms of cooking statistics to make the average graduate’s salary look much higher than it actually is.
That said, one important distinction that I haven’t seen mentioned in this tread is the difference between government loans (Stafford and Grad PLUS) and private loans. If you have all government loans, like I do, then there are programs out there to help deal with the debt. There currently exists a Federal income based repayment program, which is pretty good, although a person has to make payments for 30 years and it has some shitty tax consequences. Coming on line this year is a Federal program that provides income based repayment (15% of after tax income minus the federal poverty limit) and total forgiveness after 10 years if you work in public sector or for a non-profit and after 30 years if you work in the private sector. So at the very worst, a person with a lot of government debt is stuck paying a reasonable portion of their income for 30 years, which is the same term as a standard mortgage. If you think of the loan as a mortgage on yourself, the situation is not that bad.
For those who have private debt, on the other hand, there is some seriously usurious shit going on. The realty is that unless someone goes to a top 15 law school or finishes at the very top of their class at a tier 2 school, the stereotypical 6 figure law job is not going to be forthcoming when they graduate, if ever. That leaves a bunch of people in a position where they owe way more than any job they can get will allow them to pay back, meaning that they are likely to have to skimp on their student loan payments if they are going to be able to afford to live at all. The disgraceful part, as the article mentions, is that the private lenders tack on all sorts of insane fees for not paying in full or missing deadlines. Add in the high interest rate, and its easy to see how a lot of people wind up hopelessly behind ever paying off their debts. Also, as the article mentions, its almost impossible to discharge student debt through bankruptcy. So regardless of the wisdom of the peoples choice to go to law school or the underhanded practice of the law schools themselves, it’s a pretty shitty situation to be a person who has 100k in debt and no real prospect of ever getting out from under it.
