Dispelling the notion that "college is not worth it".

[phouka]

There’s a sub-section of colleges and some financial problems which I think are a large part of the problem. (Ah, I see Fretful Porpentine has addressed this as well.)

For several years, my mom was an administrator at an unaccredited, for-profit university. It was basically a cash cow for its corporate owner. The one thing they excelled at was suckering people into taking out large federally subsidized loans for the tuition and fees to get a worthless degree in a market that, on paper, was dying for graduates. Instead, what the students found out on graduation was that they were completely unprepared to pass state boards to get their credential, and without a credential, they couldn’t get a job. Without a job, they couldn’t pay their student loans, but that didn’t matter to the school, because the loans were subsidized by the Federal government, so the school still got their money, and the students will never be rid of that debt. Students who say the light before graduation tried to transfer only to discover that because the school was unaccredited, no school in the US would accept their credits.

This school added at least a thousand people every year who had staggering (as in $30K and more) student loan debts and no job prospects at all. That was one location in a chain of schools, and there are multiple for-profit universities out there. They are basically a tool to fleece the student loan funding the Federal government supplies. The taxpayers and the students are the ones cheated. There are finally some objections being raised and there’s oversight of the more heinous offenders, but I haven’t heard of any new laws or regulations to deal with it.

[Dangerosa]

The federal government has stopped providing federal student loans if you are attending a non-accredited school.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

As far as I can tell private accreditation is basically a rubber stamp anyway.

[Voyager]

@Aeschines

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?

Except for the colleges which are two years, of course. And people who take five years to graduate. Not to mention that you take courses besides those in your major.

One reason that college is expensive is that teaching appears to be a human labor intensive operation, where many of your teachers are expensive. In some majors you need expensive equipment to teach. The attempts at making it cheaper through on-line courses don’t seem to be working very well so far.

[ThisUsernameIsForbidden]

@Voyager

Except for the colleges which are two years, of course. And people who take five years to graduate. Not to mention that you take courses besides those in your major.

One reason that college is expensive is that teaching appears to be a human labor intensive operation, where many of your teachers are expensive. In some majors you need expensive equipment to teach. The attempts at making it cheaper through on-line courses don’t seem to be working very well so far.

Any serious look at a University budget debunks the idea that teaching is driving up tuition and fees. Think shrinking state budgets, and a business that knows it can rely on federal subsidies and increase tuition every year, while building new facilities nonstop, and competing with other universities.

[TriPolar]

@Voyager

Except for the colleges which are two years, of course. And people who take five years to graduate. Not to mention that you take courses besides those in your major.

One reason that college is expensive is that teaching appears to be a human labor intensive operation, where many of your teachers are expensive. In some majors you need expensive equipment to teach. The attempts at making it cheaper through on-line courses don’t seem to be working very well so far.

I’m not buying either the labor intensive or equipment argument. The teachers don’t spend much time teaching, and tons of equipment is donated. Liberal Arts equipment requirements are minimal. In addition for most schools land and buildings have long since been paid for.

Administrative costs and other non-educational labor costs are certainly higher than they have been historically. I don’t think online schools are attempting to lower costs, instead they seem to be trying to increase profits.

I understand the legitimate reasons for many of these costs, good teachers don’t want to spend 40 hours a week in the classroom, lots of equipment is no longer donated and schools that compete for students want the leading edge of technology available, insurance and liability are growing problems, but I don’t think there’s much effort to actually reduce the costs of higher education at all. In the case of public institutions the tax money is no longer provided to keep costs down so there’s not necessarily a lack of intent there.

[puddleglum]

@TriPolar

I’m not buying either the labor intensive or equipment argument. The teachers don’t spend much time teaching, and tons of equipment is donated. Liberal Arts equipment requirements are minimal. In addition for most schools land and buildings have long since been paid for.

Administrative costs and other non-educational labor costs are certainly higher than they have been historically. I don’t think online schools are attempting to lower costs, instead they seem to be trying to increase profits.

I understand the legitimate reasons for many of these costs, good teachers don’t want to spend 40 hours a week in the classroom, lots of equipment is no longer donated and schools that compete for students want the leading edge of technology available, insurance and liability are growing problems, but I don’t think there’s much effort to actually reduce the costs of higher education at all. In the case of public institutions the tax money is no longer provided to keep costs down so there’s not necessarily a lack of intent there.

The reason colleges charge so much is because they can. There has been a cycle where college is expensive because what the credential they sell is in demand. This makes it hard for most people to afford. This creates a call for government subsidies. Colleges then raise their prices to capture this subsidy. This makes it harder for people to afford.

[Razncain]

For many, college is a huge rip off. Many don’t even ever find employment in the field they were studying. Some professions are certainly more in demand than others.

I think for quite a few, it’s wiser to learn a skilled trade, and if you want to go out on your own and start your own biz, maybe even better, because then you call your shots, and set your own hours. It’s not for everybody though.

If it’s money that is driving you, many oil field jobs that don’t require any college will easily surpass what the average BS degree makes. $100,00-$150,000 is common after a few years, but requires lots of overtime, and often travel. My cousin brought in $250,000 last year, and he’s not even 30 yet. No college, just learned a particular skill in the oil industry, and he goes wherever his certain equipment goes.

[TriPolar]

@puddleglum

The reason colleges charge so much is because they can. There has been a cycle where college is expensive because what the credential they sell is in demand. This makes it hard for most people to afford. This creates a call for government subsidies. Colleges then raise their prices to capture this subsidy. This makes it harder for people to afford.

I agree mostly, but it’s not all that simple. There is a demand aspect to this also.

[adaher]

But when you light a fire under demand with easily available credit, you get a classic bubble situation.

I don’t think there’s any doubt we are in the midst of a student loan bubble. The only question is going to be what happens when the federal government realizes that it’s got a few hundred billion dollars in loans that will never be repaid.

[Sam_Stone]

@msmith537

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.

But an electrician will make more money than a social worker. And unless you went to an ivy league law school and/or landed a job with a prestigious law firm, that electrician will probably make more than a lawyer, too. Around here, nurses make more than double the median income. Most tradesman make more money than many college grads.

There is also the issue of confounding variables. To the extent that college grads make more money than non college grads, how much of that is due to the actual college degree, and how much of it is due to the inherent qualities in a person that allow them to graduate from college in the first place? The “College Grad” category also selects for intelligence, work ethic, ability to plan ahead, self-reliance, willingness ensure current work for long-term benefits, etc. So is it the college or the other qualities that make you earn more?

Are there any studies that look at people who dropped out of college for financial or family reasons, but who had otherwise good grades, and compared their lifetime incomes to people who did graduate from similar programs? I’d be interested to see that.

[P-man]

If I had been able to get a job out of high school doing anything other than menial labor I probably wouldn’t have gone to college. It wasn’t that I found school difficult, it was the opposite. I was one of those kids who really hated school. Since I have no mechanical or sales aptitude, college was my only choice if I wanted to make more than minimum wage (this was in the early eighties). My undergraduate history/political science degree was pretty worthless, but it allowed me to gain entry to an MLS program. This led to a long and relatively successful career in libraries. I still get sick of almost any class I have to take, even if I find the first few weeks interesting. If one of my kids had the aptitude to do something that didn’t require college where they could earn a living and enjoy life, I’d say go for it. Of course we parents are the ones that will be paying for the first four years. Bottom line is sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not.

[adaher]

The race issue aside didn’t Charles Murray find that high IQs meant high earnings regardless of their educational achievement?

[Sam_Stone]

@ThisUsernameIsForbidden

Any serious look at a University budget debunks the idea that teaching is driving up tuition and fees. Think shrinking state budgets, and a business that knows it can rely on federal subsidies and increase tuition every year, while building new facilities nonstop, and competing with other universities.

Exactly right. The exploding cost of college has a lot more to do with the rapid increase in administrative costs, the escalation of salaries among administrators, and the ‘upscaling’ of college campuses in response to subsidy pressure. The actual faculties are not growing at anywhere near the same rate, and the increased reliance on adjunct professors and other lower-level employees to handle the bulk of student demands is actually lowering the cost of the faculty itself.

Some of these large colleges have an entire hierarchy of staff devoted to ‘diversity’ - a bureaucratic arm that didn’t even exist a decade or two ago. Here in Canada, the President of Waterloo university makes over a million dollars per year. Ten other college Presidents make over $500,000 per year. In the U.S., the median salary for public university presidents in 2008 was $427,000. The president of Ohio State University made 1.3 million. Last year, the President of the University of Chicago made 3.3 million dollars. The University of Michigan paid 7.46 million dollars to its top 16 executives most of whom got annual raises between 3.5% and 25%, while others got $100,000 bonuses.

[Sam_Stone]

Statements like “Going to College is better than not going” are virtually useless. Nearly as useless are simple measures of college benefits such as comparisons of annual incomes between college grads and non-grads.

Going to college can be the best decision of your life - or the worst. First of all, if you’re making this argument to choose whether or not to go to college, you have to figure in the results of all the people who go but who do not complete a degree. According to this article in the Atlantic, only 56% of people who start a bachelor’s degree finish it within six years. And only 46% of people who start college ever get a degree.

So the first question you have to ask is whether the person you are advising has what it takes to make it through college in the first place. And that doesn’t just mean intelligence and education - it means financial circumstances, family issues, health, etc. And if you’re looking at the overall college income statistics as an argument for going to college, you simply have to factor in the cost of more than half of the people spending tens of thousands of dollars and wasting years of their lives and getting nothing at all.

The second most important thing is the choice of faculty. It drives me crazy to see ‘college grad’ treated as if it’s a monolithic thing. Here in Canada, graduates with degrees in communications, social work or psychology earn well below the Canadian median income. A lot of the basic sciences are very low paying. Anthropologists don’t make much. A degree in ‘environmental science’ (a very popular choice these days) will be lucky to get you a median income. The fine arts are basically a crapshoot. A degree in theater or photography or art appreciation will probably net you exactly bupkis unless you get lucky or are extraordinarily talented - in which case you probably didn’t need the degree anyway.

Even the STEM fields vary widely in income. Get an undergraduate degree in physics, and what are you qualified for? Junior lab work? Research assistant for near minimum wage? How about a general degree in biology? What are you going to do with that? There are jobs out there for field assistants, Museum workers, some jobs for biologists in public health or city management, but none of them pay particularly well and there aren’t that many jobs.

Next you have to consider the cost of the education and the opportunity cost of spending all that time out of the work force. If you have wealthy parents who can fund your education and help kick-start your life once you’re out, that’s one thing. If you’re a poor person who will have to go through on student loans, it’s quite another.

Consider two friends with the same skills, roughly the same intelligence, who went to the same school. One chooses to go to college, while the other decides to apprentice as an electrician. The one who goes to college wants to ‘find herself’ and just be better educated, so she takes a B.A. in English.

Four years later, they meet up. The friend who went into a trade is a certified journeyman. As an apprentice he started at $15/hr, but rapidly worked his way up and now earns the median salary for a Journeyman of $30.05 per hour. He’s got four years of work experience and seniority, has been contributing to a 401(k) and has four years into his pension plan. His job experience and earnings have allowed him to buy his first house, and he’s engaged to be married. He can expect his annual salary to increase to about $88,000, which is the top end of the pay scale for an electrician with 20 years of experience. And since he started young, he’s on track to retire at 55.

The other person has no job, and has come out of school with $120,000 in debt. The median salary for a person with a bachelor of arts degree and less than 5 years of experience is about $40,000. The highest level after 20 years is about $84,000. So she will never make as much as her journeyman friend.

But it’s much worse than that. She’s not going to be able to buy a house for years and years because of that debt overhang. She may have a hard time finding a mate, because people don’t like marrying into large debt. So while her friend is accumulating assets like a house and retirement fund, she’s accumulating more debt through interest. And if she can’t find a job soon, she’s screwed. So perhaps she’ll go back to school and spend a few more years on something practical like a teaching degree or an advanced degree in something. But then she’ll come out closer to $200,000 in debt, be nearing 30, and just trying to get a start on life. In the meantime, her journeyman friend has a family, a home, and a good start on retirement.

This is not an atypical scenario. I know a lot of people who through this exact problem, and it was a lot easier to do ten or twenty years ago than it is now. When I was working my way through college I worked at a Radio Shack, and the guy working beside me had a Master’s degree in English and working at Radio Shack was the best he could do.

We do poor average kids a horrible disservice by pressuring them into college. For a large percentage of them, it’s not worth it. Twenty years ago you could work your way through college and gain work experience and come out debt free. With all the tuition inflation we’ve seen, I don’t think that’s possible any more.

Here in Canada, the worst paying fields (psychology, social work, human services, communications, visual arts) are also among the fastest-growing faculties. There’s something wrong with that. And that something is probably us pushing way too many kids into college - kids who aren’t interested in or qualified to study engineering, pharmaceuticals, medicine, Computer Science or Mathematics - the fields that actually do pay a lot more.

[Voyager]

@TriPolar

I’m not buying either the labor intensive or equipment argument. The teachers don’t spend much time teaching, and tons of equipment is donated. Liberal Arts equipment requirements are minimal. In addition for most schools land and buildings have long since been paid for.

If professors taught more than two classes a term, at most, there would be fewer of them, right?
I’ve donated computer equipment to universities - and tried to donate some more. It is not so easy. There is expensive space for them, power, cooling, and maintenance. And they have to be relevant. You’d be surprised at how un-eager universities are - or they’ll say “we’ll take it, but you have to pay for a computer center also.”
Buildings, especially old ones, need maintenance, and lots of colleges are building new buildings for new labs.
Some professors cost more than others. Since undergraduates pay the same no matter what their major, Liberal Arts students pay for the expensive STEM and business professors. And sports is not the only area where colleges pay for super stars. Famous professors get big bucks.

Administrative costs and other non-educational labor costs are certainly higher than they have been historically. I don’t think online schools are attempting to lower costs, instead they seem to be trying to increase profits.

I mean online courses at regular schools. If you could charge a broader audience even a bit it could help pay for the course taken by regular students. I think a lot of for-profit colleges are going to be gone once the government holds them accountable, so I’m not talking about them.

I understand the legitimate reasons for many of these costs, good teachers don’t want to spend 40 hours a week in the classroom, lots of equipment is no longer donated and schools that compete for students want the leading edge of technology available, insurance and liability are growing problems, but I don’t think there’s much effort to actually reduce the costs of higher education at all. In the case of public institutions the tax money is no longer provided to keep costs down so there’s not necessarily a lack of intent there.

What is the use of adjunct professors except an attempt to keep costs down?
State colleges are under extreme financial pressure - they are trying, but I agree with you that they haven’t figured out how to cut costs yet.

[Voyager]

@ThisUsernameIsForbidden

Any serious look at a University budget debunks the idea that teaching is driving up tuition and fees. Think shrinking state budgets, and a business that knows it can rely on federal subsidies and increase tuition every year, while building new facilities nonstop, and competing with other universities.

Not driving up, but it is a significant factor in what tuition and fees are already.
State schools in particular are not ignoring reduced support. Undergrads i state schools used to be able to stay in dorms all four years if they wanted to - now they are kicked out after one or two to save money on housing costs.

[even_sven]

@adaher

But when you light a fire under demand with easily available credit, you get a classic bubble situation.

I don’t think there’s any doubt we are in the midst of a student loan bubble. The only question is going to be what happens when the federal government realizes that it’s got a few hundred billion dollars in loans that will never be repaid.

I am not sure why they wouldn’t be paid, given that federal student loans can be repaid at 15% (10% for newer borrowers) of ones disposable income (defined as gross income after twice the poverty rate), with generous options for hardship deferrals and full loan forgiveness after 25 years (or 10 if you are in a public service field.)

Loans aren’t awesome and student loans can’t be dismissed by bankruptcy. But federal student loans should not be driving anyone in to poverty and despair.

[adaher]

Those loans you’re talking about are unpaid and fall onto the taxpayer. It wasn’t a huge deal before, but right now the government’s balance sheet is looking pretty awful. This could be as bad as the S&L bailout.

[even_sven]

@adaher

Those loans you’re talking about are unpaid and fall onto the taxpayer. It wasn’t a huge deal before, but right now the government’s balance sheet is looking pretty awful. This could be as bad as the S&L bailout.

The US government made a $66 billion profit on student loans from 2005-2012. The estimated profit over the next 10 years is $185 billion. Do you still want to argue that federal student loans are going to drive the government into bankruptcy?

And that is, of course, above and beyond the well-documented increase in productivity that comes with a better educated workforce. There is a reason why China is paying US college professors millions to come show them how it’s done on the campuses they are building and filling as fast as they can, as they outsource their low-skill manufacturing to Africa. Education makes countries money.