You sure about that?
Because you don’t need a 4 year bachelors degree for most skilled trade jobs. The point is that there are certain careers where you simply have to go to college.
There’s nothing “wrong” with trade jobs. But as a general rule, a nurse makes less money than a doctor. A paralegal has less prestige than a lawyer. A draftsman or machinist tends to have fewer careers options than an architect or engineer.
There definitely is an attitude in this country that college is a ticket out of having to do “real” work. Or it is a path to more “intellectual” work managing, strategizing and consulting.
As someone who had to go to college Or Else (the exact details were never specified), I’ve given this quite a bit of thought.
In general, I think that what’s important is having options available and matching the right person to the right option: if your kid loves books and wants to get a degree in History with the goal of doing some sort of office work(1), don’t bother yelling “our forefathers were mule drivers, my father bought his first truck, I’ve been a trucker all my life, you bloody well will be a truck driver!”; if your kid can’t concentrate on black-on-white for more than half a minute and loves taking things apart then putting them back together, he’s probably better suited to training as a mechanic (2) or HVAC specialist (3) than to law school.
The hard part is in figuring which is which, in taking into account the specific individual’s wants, needs and abilities and the possibilities within his/her reach, over the wants and needs of the parents… or of the well-meaning star manager who I suspect has problems playing “what would I have become professionally if I hadn’t gone to college” 
(Me, I would have wanted to become a draftsman: took draftsmanship every year starting in 6th grade, was good enough that my 12th-grade teacher assumed I’d be getting a perfect grade in college-level draftsmanship. I did.)
1: my brother’s BFF, currently HR manager for a company which was a 1-factory concern when he started as an admin and now has 10 factories in 6 countries.
2: a second-cousin of mine.
3: a classmate who now owns a HVAC/plumbing/electrical work company (his younger cousin/partner who went to vocational administration training and eventually got an MBA is the administrative manager, he’s the ops guy).
Some thought about the colleges/trades:
The people who say college is not worth it, for me, tell that to the students/people who are middle/work/poor class (by society standing or by economic level). They don’t tell that to the higher earning groups. :dubious: They say instead that they should go to trades (note: nursing in many places requires a BSN now, and it is not a “trade” career anymore).
If college truly is not that important, if trade skills are a valid alternative, then start telling that to the students in preppy college school who have no idea what they want to major in, not to the poor/middle class student who has a defined career and the skills so far to handle the course load. Start telling the students from affluent backgrounds that they don’t have to college, they can learn a trade, and of course they’ll make it to have their own little trade business as contractors, and have as much money as an engineer and as much prestige as well.
Also note that many people who do well or excel at trades are people who likely had the “smarts” and capacity to attend college. Perhaps they wouldn’t have found a major they would fit in, but it’s not as if they don’t have the intellect. Yes, to do some of the basic work may not require much theory, but I bet those who make very well have managerial and business skills comparable to those who major in various business degrees.
Finally, I don’t think many people “fail” college because they don’t have the “smarts”. I think it is mostly they don’t find what they fit in, what is their passion, what is it that they want to do for their lives. Granted, that may change, and it is good if you get a major that allows some change in that.
This really is a very complicated issue.
Going to college has some fairly concrete inputs:
- Money
- Time
- Effort
The outputs are a little less concrete:
- Knowledge
- Experience (organizing work, working in a team, etc.)
- Increased job opportunities based on on the intrinsic value of 1 and 2 above but because of societal hoops, etc. This tends to be what people focus on.
College is definitely less “worth it” than it was in the past. It used to be if you were a college grad, you were set. Today, the inputs are most certainly higher than they used to be (except for No. 3) adjusted for inflation, and output No. 3 is definitely worse. If this trend continues, then there will be a point at which output No. 3 is not worth the inputs for most people who do it.
College is a no-brainer for anyone whose dream requires the degree: doctors, lawyers, teachers, pharmacists, mathematicians, scientists, etc. etc. In these cases, the educational content is fairly congruent with the knowledge needed to do the job, and the system works.
But how about college as an course of study for people who just want “a good job.” In that case, I think it’s total bullshit. The curricula have very little to do with what people will be doing in the world of business (aside from business majors), and the delivery system is woefully inefficient (including business majors). People do it not because they want to, not because they are seeking the knowledge that they supposedly will get, but rather because it’s a societal hoop that they will jump through because they feel they have no choice.
Let me use myself as an example. I got a full ride to a mid-tier school in Chicago. The school was kind enough to give me a full year’s worth of AP credits for my test results. It was crazy. For example, I got 6 physics credits for a 3 on the physics test. I was not very enthusiastic about “going to college,” however. It was just something I had to do. I went through a couple majors until I landed on one I thought I could stand, and I got the hell out of there at age 21.
I graduated in 3 years, but I still get all the benefits of the degree. What if I had gotten 3 years of AP credit and had graduated in 1 year–would anyone know the difference? I doubt it. After I graduated, I immediately went to Japan and became an English teacher. The Japanese government required the degree I had in order to get the visa I got (this will be true for most work visas). Could I have been an English teacher and performed at pretty much the same level at age 19? I’m pretty sure I could have.
I do not regret going to college, but I made it work for me. My real talent is writing, and I took classes in which I wrote a lot, and that definitely was good for me. I met cool people and had good experiences. Some of the things I studied in my classes have stuck with me, but a significant percentage of the classes I took were a total waste of time. Plus, I am an intellectual at heart, something that cannot be said for probably 90% or more of college students.
By the way, I later went on to business school, two years which I found to be much more valuable to me than college. Almost all of my classes were valuable sources of knowledge. But the b-school curriculum has been designed with specific goals in mind, and it is a dense two years. The same is not true of 4-year college, in my opinion.
So, the upshot is that I think we have for the most part a shitty, inefficient higher education system that does not impart valuable knowledge to the vast majority of students and that exists only as a society hoop to keep young people out of the workforce and to teach them conformity. It’s an exploitative system that serves the needs of the administration and tenured professors, and most of it ought to be torn down. Thus, the question of whether it’s “worth it” or not is for the most part the wrong question. The right question is, “Why do we have to put up with this shitty system?”
There is another way in which the question can be raised inappropriately. Instead of meaning, “Do the benefits outweigh the costs?” it can mean, “Will this at least give me a chance at lifestyle XYZ?” For example, even if the chance of getting a “good job” with a college diploma in the year 2014 is just 5%, someone could say, “Well, 5% is better than 0%.” Now that could make sense as a personal choice, but that reasoning would not justify college for the average student.
TL;DR:
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College is much worse deal than it used to be and guarantees very little for most graduates.
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The higher education system in this country is crap (for most curricula), and we shouldn’t validate it.
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The opportunity cost of college is very high, and many people would in fact do better by pursuing their dreams directly after high school instead of spending the four years and a lot of money on college.
The data there is really limited, its a snapshot of a certain age group a few years post college, and no, I’m not sure. My ninth grader will go into the trades. He doesn’t want a desk job. He wants to work with his hands. And he isn’t intellectually inclined.
We tend to make fun of liberal arts majors, but the thing is that even a four year degree in Theatre is a four year degree - and can be turned into a corporate job if you want. Tech schools also have their majors that aren’t lucrative - nail techs don’t make any more than minimum wage - often less. Lots of the jobs at a tech school are done part time - we think about plumbers, but there are a lot of dental hygienist who work three day weeks and raise families.
But I think the data supports that over the long term, you need some training beyond high school to give you the best chance of living outside poverty - that showing up at the Ford factory to work on the line and make a good living isn’t a probable career path. And I suspect that the two axes for success are practicality of said training and the amount you get. A dermatologist will make more money than a nail tech. But a plumber may well out earn someone with their PhD in Comparative Literature during their lifetimes. Some people will always be able to take their high school degree and manage to get rich starting and operating a landscaping business…but thats going to be the exception.
The idea that the higher education is “crap” is against all available evidence. The US has the best higher education system in the world, and countries are trilling over themselves to send their kids to our schools or to imitate them back home. It’s not a straightforward “X in , Y out” equation, but it’s one that works.
I’m a little less harsh but I understand where you are coming from with these points. I think if we demand placement rates and have a say in what our public institutions are doing, then much of these problems will go away.
The other thing to keep in mind is that money does not buy happiness (but it can help). In other words - making a small income doing what you love may be a better life than making twice as much and dreading work - as long as you can feed yourself and keep a roof over your head. A friend of mine is a writer, he’ll never get rich (he has a degree, he majored in theatre), but he loves what he does.
My son might make a better living if he applied himself and got a degree in mechanical engineering. He’s got the math skills - but he doesn’t WANT to do that. He’d rather be a mechanic than a mechanical engineer. And he can make a living being a mechanic (he hasn’t decided which trade to go into yet). He is taking basic business classes in high school - because I’ve told him that where the money is in most trades is in running your own small business. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of those kids who gets a trade school certification and by the time he is 30 he is finishing his B.S. in business.
Just think how much richer Bill Gates would be if he completed his degree.
College has two costs, the cost of tuition and opportunity cost. The tuition cost is around 100 grand for 4 years and the opportunity cost is variable but another 100 grand might be a reasonable guess. At that rate if the college premium is 17.5k then you have to work full time for twelve years for college to be worth it. That does not include interest which will push it back several more years.
What most people don’t factor in is that most of the value of college comes when you get the degree. This is called the sheepskin effect. If you drop out and don’t get the degree you don’t get the value, but they still send you the bills. Currently, about 45% of students drop out of college before graduating. In order to know if it is worth it you have to account for the possiblity that you won’t graduate. If the average student has a 55% chance of graduating there are many below average students who have a much smaller chance. Paying $100,000 for a 10% chance at a degree is probably not worth it. The question becomes where is the margin where attempting college becomes a good deal. With the cost of college skyrocketing the answer is that it is not a good deal for as many people as it used to be and that it becomes a bad deal for more people every year.
What does “placement” mean? Most of the scare statistics we see are referring to recent graduates, one or two years out of their degree. It’s not surprising to me that entry level workers are working entry level jobs or having trouble getting started in a bad economy. It typically takes a few years to find your feet and start moving into more advanced positions.
A better measure would be looking five or even ten years out.
College is obviously worth it, but I do think people need to take a much more sophisticated view of college. I think there are broadly two groups of potential college students:
- Students who do not need to worry about paying for college and will not be going into debt in order to go to college.
and
- Students who will need to worry about how to pay those tuition checks and who will probably be going into debt in order to go to college.
If you’re in group one very little matters, just go. Small private liberal arts school where you can have experiences that are “impactful” for you? Great, go there. Drop out after 2 years? Oh well.
Since you’re in group one it never really hurts. Ideally you do still get a degree which sets you up for a decent career, because you still are investing the finite resource of time. But by and large group 1 students can go to whichever school most excites them and study whichever field most excites them to their heart’s content.
Everyone else needs to rigorously analyze their college decision, to a greater degree than you analyze purchasing a home. Most individuals I’d say give their college pick less analysis than they do their first car purchase, to show how out of whack the decision making is.
For Group 2 students, every factor must be considered. It’s really too much to list here because it’s such a broad subject but just to outline some of them:
-What is your end goal occupationally?
-Is your career field one in which the ultra-selective private schools carry with them meaningful cachet such that it will help you in your career?
-If you can’t get into the ultra-selective schools, do you know which schools actually offer you the most meaningful opportunities?
-What scholarship or low income benefits are available to you? This isn’t just stuff you get from filling out FAFSA, many schools offer their own set of benefits to attract qualified low income students.
-What is your ability? Can you do the work required in the career of your choice? If not, what career could your credits seque into if you can’t quite go all the way in your career choice?
-How long will it take you to pay back your student loans in your career choice, given average earnings in said career?
-If your parents live near a college that meets your needs, have you considered living at home? Or are you just assuming that because it’s more fun to move away and live in the dorms and party that it’s a better decision than the much less fun but vastly cheaper option of living on Mom & Dad’s dime?
-Have you investigated options to take 1-2 years of Community College courses as part of a program that lets you then transfer to a traditional school and graduate with a Bachelor from that school? (Thus meaning a much cheaper education with the exact same prestige associated with your final school.)
For parents, let’s be honest you should also know if you have a “marginal” student. If your kid, despite working hard couldn’t break a 3.0 GPA in High School and has weak ACT or SAT scores, should you consider what sort of 2-year degree program or certification program in one of the trades might be better suited for them? Kids in this category whose parents push them into traditional four year schools are often the ones who are the one and done party kids who immediately get out of their depth so just party away for a semester or two before dropping out. These kids end up with no marketable job skills and usually thousands of dollars in debt. For their trouble they are eligible to work jobs in the service sector that barely clears minimum wage.
Many two year degree programs can move them in the direction of the trades, but also gives them college (albeit community college) classroom experience. Some kids are bad students and grow into good ones, and maybe they’ll discover after getting a 4.0 GPA in community college while working toward a trade they have matured and grown as a student to the point they might now be appropriate candidates for traditional college.
Instead of any holistic decision making process, I believe most kids who fail at college (and are in Group 2 where failure actually hurts them) are basically pushed into college by parental or peer pressure, are asked “where do you want to go?” and they pick wherever their friends are going or whichever school looks coolest from the brochures and aimlessly drift into college. Some may turn out okay, but many fail out and end up thousands of dollars in debt working at McDonald’s. That situation should essentially never happen, and by actually understanding the implications of the decisions made around time to go to college it almost never would happen.
It depends. Some college is not worth it. There are colleges that take students’ money without conveying any useful knowledge in return, and there are students who probably cannot benefit from college in any meaningful way. (I’m thinking here of a young woman who was in one of my classes a few years ago, and who received a failing grade on a paper because it was copied word for word from SparkNotes. It’s fairly common for community colleges around here to teach students nothing whatsoever about how to avoid plagiarism, so I called her into my office and asked her when and where she had taken English 101. In the course of this conversation, it came out that she had been suffered a head injury in a car accident a few years earlier and claimed that she should be excused for the plagiarism because she was no longer able to learn or remember anything new. This is a student who was genuinely wasting her money and time in college. Unfortunately, she eventually managed to graduate with a bullshit degree in “general studies,” which at my institution is code for “this person is incapable of completing the requirements for a real major,” and believe me, the employers around here know it. Fortunately, she didn’t get a degree in education, which was her original plan.)
There are colleges whose entire business model is based on recruiting students like this and charging them exorbitant amounts of tuition. Those degrees are not worth it.
There are also colleges, mine among them, that have relatively low admissions requirements and take a chance on some students who may not be capable, but are not exploiting those students; our tuition for in-state students is lower than the maximum Pell Grant award, and if you major in anything but general studies, we will give you an education. You will get a better education if you challenge yourself and seek out departments with high standards and a culture of intellectual achievement, which means, at this particular institution, that you are better off majoring in almost any traditional humanities or sciences field rather than, say, culinary arts or business or paralegal studies, even if those fields sound more practical in the short term. But in almost any major, students will find small classes, engaged faculty, and lots of opportunities for individual mentoring. We’re not a name-brand school, and the dorms are old and we don’t have an athletics program, but we’re the real deal and we’re a lot CHEAPER than the Phoenixes of the world. For most students, we’re worth it.
There are private colleges that have a very high sticker price but provide an excellent education and a range of cultural and intellectual opportunities most schools can only dream of, as well as a name on the diploma that automatically impresses people. For most students, those schools are worth it. (For some, they are probably a waste of money; there is probably no particular advantage in going to Princeton if your ambition in life is to be a kindergarten teacher, unless, of course, Princeton offers you a full ride – which they might, since the sticker price is usually not the same as the actual price.)
There are also private colleges that have posh facilities but run-of-the-mill academics, and do expect most students to pay full sticker price, since tuition is where they make their money. Those colleges probably aren’t worth it, in comparison to any respectable state university – but sometimes, for students who want a particular type of experience and are willing to pay for it, they are.
Part of the problem is that so many different types of institutions get lumped together under the general heading of “college” that it is VERY difficult to generalize. Price, in this case, often does not correlate with quality, so students REALLY need to do their research and know where the bargains are. People who do make sweeping generalizations about the value of college are often engaging in some intellectual sleight of hand – conflating, for example, tuition and debt loads at private and public institutions, or assuming that the sticker price is what any given student will actually pay. (BTW, one of the non-job-related benefits of a good college education is that it trains students to understand complexity and spot oversimplifications and specious arguments. This is an invaluable skill, as long as students actually learn it.)
And that, of course, brings me to the other problem. There are also many different kinds of students, and they vary in both their ability and their willingness to benefit from an education. Also, colleges tend to be priced on an all-you-can-eat buffet model; paying a flat amount of tuition gets students access to a whole range of services and opportunities, both social and intellectual, but a student who only shows up for classes and then goes home is missing out on many of those features. A student who doesn’t show up for classes is missing out on more.
College has never been worth it for some people. Now with higher costs and less demand for some degrees it’s not worth it for more people. If costs go down or demand for graduates goes up it will be worth it for more people.Hardly an argument here.
$25,000, hah! I had to borrow $51,000 to complete my (graduate) degree at a state university even though I was working full time. I’m just lucky my parents and scholarships paid for undergrad.
Don’t have a cite, but the recent stories on how high school graduation rates have gone over 80% (the highest ever) have also noted that the percentage of high school graduates going to college has dropped. Maybe a good thing.
But lots of anecdotes about this college grad being broke or that non-college grad owing a company and being rich doesn’t change the statistics already cited. You should learn that in Stat 101.
I wonder how much of the problem is lack of self-evaluation. Some people make money even in fields with issues. Others don’t. When I graduated I got a job offer even though I did nearly everything wrong during interviewing - I was smart enough to go to grad school instead. In today’s economy I would have gotten nothing, though today’s kids are a lot smarter about interviewing than I was. Today you need to be honest with yourself about what you are good at as opposed to what you would like to be doing. And one big advantage of college is that it opens up a lot more possibilities than not going.
If you don’t go to college, you don’t take Stat 101 
I amazed at how many people take our educational system at face value in these debates. They just assume it’s A-OK and then argue over whether it’s worth the price that’s attached to it.
Yes, our higher education system is better those of other countries, but that doesn’t mean the whole concept is good in the first place. I would say it’s not.
Look, the people running it have an interest in not making education efficient. In dragging it all out. I think it’s weird that college is four years, for one thing. No matter what the major, four years. Yeah, right. What else in life is like that?
I think a reconstruction from the ground up is in order, but the vested interests are monumental.
I am making a point about the clarity of your OP. I find that the structure of your points do not make clearly defined distinctions. You are saying that a college degree is worth it because of the difference in earning potential between college and high school grads. This leaves out trade school and 2 year colleges. My suggestion is that it would be more clear if you said having a bachelors degree is better than going to trade school also because you make x amount more. I don’t disagree with the message, I just think it could be stated more clearly.
‘Placement’ just needs to give consumers valuable information regarding job opportunities via meaningful statistics. We can (and should) be scientific about it.