I literally know not a single person with a graduate degree who paid tuition for it. Not a one. Unless you count law school and medical school. And most of the people I know socially have graduate degrees.
I have three graduate degrees. I may have spent $2000 on books and supplies in aggregate for all three. Zero tuition and close to $100k in stipends and fellowships over seven years (this was a long time ago)
The ONLY people in grad school I knew who were paying out of their own pockets were MBA students. Most of them were being financed by their employers, at least partially.
Maybe I’m an anomaly but everyone I know who has a so-called “soft degree” has had a perfectly fine career. Two art majors who are now schoolteachers. A history major who is now a tenured professor of history at a small college. Etc.
Also one never knows where life goes. My sister has a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She now works as a political lobbyist.
And this is absolutely an issue that’s just skyrocketed in the past few decades. When I started college at a Northeastern US SPLAC** almost 40 years ago*** it was overwhelmingly upper-middle-class white kids, but mostly from comparatively modest lifestyles. Campus environments nowadays are starting to sound reminiscent of Stover at Yale days with class-segregated institutional cultures dominated by a wealth aristocracy.
I remember a college roommate from the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum who was a bit embarrassed to admit to other students that she had a trust fund. Being really open or ostentatious about an unusual degree of wealth was not very socially acceptable. That seems to have significantly changed now.
Same here, and that’s true across the disciplines, for English and Classics PhDs as well as for math and physics ones.
I can well believe that there may be quite a few people who go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to pay for a zero-aid Masters’ degree in some field that they thought would make them more marketable, and that some of them made a bad bet and ended up crippled by debt. But AFAICT this tends to be a matter of poor individual choices, rather than economic ghettoization of specific fields.
The problem of exploitation of non-tenured faculty in academia is certainly real, but, again AFAICT, it’s largely separate from the problem of student debt. I’ve known some exploited adjunct faculty, but none of them had to pay a dime on their PhDs.
There’s one more thing that I’m sure the trade school advocates will sneer at, which is it helps to educate yourself for a career you won’t hate. We have a friend who really wanted to be an art major, but her father insisted she major in business. She did, worked in benefits, and hated it for over 30 years and retired as quickly as she could. This was almost 50 years ago, so things were easier than today.
Is that worth it? Do you really want your kid to be miserable and practical?
Human Services and Community Organization: $41,000
Studio Arts: $42,000
Social Work: $42,000
Teacher Education: Multiple Levels: $42,000
Visual and Performing Arts: $42,000
Theology and Religious Vocations: $43,000
Elementary Education: $43,000
Drama and Theater Arts: $45,000
Family and Consumer Sciences: $45,000
Language and Drama Education: $45,000
Special Needs Education: $45,000
That’s for people who actually work in a field related to their major. The average for all college grads was $61,000. So if you convince people to go to college given that $61,000 ‘average college grad’ figure and they take one of the above majors, they will be sorely disappointed.
Those aren’t starting salaries, btw. That’s the median for all workers aged 25 to 59. In contrast, people with a high school diploma had a median salary of $36,000. If it takes you four years and costs you $100,000 for your degree, statistically you will never catch up to the high school grad in lifetime earnings if you take one of those programs. $42,000-$36000 is a $6,000/yr differential. If the person with a HS education started work at $25,000 /yr when you went to college, you will be behind by $200,000 in tuition and opportunity cost when you graduate. It would take you more than 30 years to catch up.
Worse, you take the financial hit for college up front, but only get paid back slowly over decades, so you have to discount the gains from higher lifetime income. And if you took student loans you also have the interest cost to pay back
And that’s comparing to all high school grads. If you compare those degrees to a skilled trade alternative it looks worse. Almost all trades pay more than any of those degrees listed above. For example, the average salary for electricians ranges from $43,000 in Arkansas to $78,000 in New York. That’s better than the average salary for all college grads. And there’s almost never a shortage of jobs for a skilled tradesman.
Also, if you assume that on balance college grads are some combination of smarter, harder working or more conscientous as a cohort, you would expect them to make more than average even if they didn’t go to college.
The ‘college premium’ really only exists for top schools or for certain degrees (mostly STEM). Your average humanities degree will not earn enough of a premium to offset the time and money it costs to get it. If you want a college premium, study engineering or chemistry or some other hard program that is in demand.
Yup. I have nothing against anybody of whatever background preferring to go to a trade school or apprenticeship rather than college, if that’s what they want. And I don’t think the college-educated should look down on the skilled trades (or anyone else, for that matter) as somehow “inferior” or “unworthy”.
But ISTM that career snobbery cuts both ways, and is harmful in both directions. Instead of trying to “art-shame” students for their intellectual preferences and interests, we should be encouraging them to pursue what they love while also developing career adaptability.
Wasn’t it you, just a few dozen posts ago, who cautioned against relying on the big-picture averages, and focusing on specific examples?
Of that $71,000 average grad school debt, how much do you think it might be driven up by expensive professional degrees like law and medicine? A median figure would be much more indicative than an average for a stat like this. Also, it’s somewhat problematic to conflate Masters and Doctoral programs when talking about grad school, because while the vast majority of Masters programs require students to pay for tuition, the vast majority of Ph.D. programs not only take care of all or most of the tuition fees, but they also provide stipends to a significant proportion of their students.
I entered a Ph.D. program in 2000, and when I started the standard package in my department (History) was a full payment of your tuition fees, as well as a four-year stipend that was, in a cheap city like Baltimore, pretty much enough to live on. A requirement of the program–not just finaincial but also in terms of professional development–was that Ph.D. students apply for outside grants and fellowships as well, because not many history grad students finish a doctorate in four years. I got a few small and medium grants that helped me extend my funded years, and so did many of my grad school colleagues. My wife was in the same program as me, and she left with a considerable student loan debt, but almost all of that was from her undergrad years, not from the grad program.
Since I left, my grad school (Johns Hopkins) has, like a lot of other top-tier schools, recognized that the number of graduating Ph.D.s was in excess of what the market would bear, and has actually begun reducing the size of the yearly grad student intake, and increasing both the duration and the amount of the grad student stipends. They used to admit about 12-14 students a year, with a 4-year stipend of about $16,000 a year. Last I heard, they were dropping the annual cohort to about 8 students, each getting five years of funding at close to $30,000 per year.
I’ve known people with large student debt from undergrad, from Masters programs, and from places like law school and med school, but, like others in this thread, I know only a few people who went through Ph.D. programs and emerged with significant debt.
But as I already pointed out to you, with cites, the average college graduate does not end up owing anything like $100,000 for their four-year undergraduate degree. The median debt amount is $17K, and even the mean debt amount is less than twice that.
Your NerdWallet cite of an average $71,000 student loan debt is for graduate school borrowers. And it includes the typically very expensive professional-school costs that fledgling doctors/dentists/lawyers frequently do go hundreds of thousands into debt for.
So that’s where that scary big number of $71,000 is coming from. It’s not particularly relevant to the majority of grad students getting an advanced degree in an academic field, and it’s completely irrelevant to the issue of undergraduate degree loan debt.
But AFAICT that’s on your stubbornly-repeated bullshit assumption that “your average humanities degree” will cost the average humanities student $100,000 in undergraduate student loan debt. Now that it’s been pointed out to you once again that that assumption is bullshit, how does that affect your numbers?
I’ll also note that the majority of the “lowest paying majors” you listed are not in fact in humanities disciplines: they’re in some form of education or social-work service area. And the chief reason they’re comparatively low-paying is that the work they do has traditionally been dominated by women, and “women’s work” is traditionally very under-compensated.
It’s not that most of those areas are low-paying because they’re frivolous fluff pastimes that society “doesn’t need”: there are few things society needs more than childhood education, for example. No, they’re low-paying because society has traditionally been able to get away with grossly underpaying women for their important work.
Did you notice how the overlap of high debt and low pay is almost non-existent?
It’s almost as if people are willing to take on debt for degrees like MDs, DMDs, DPTs, DVM, JDs and PharmDs that have high income potential. Many teachers shell out $50k for a part time MEd degree, but they often get an immediate $5k increase in pay (in our school district and many others in this area) and become eligible for department head positions that come with another $10-15k bump.
46% of graduate degree holders have zero debt. I bet it’s not because they all had $100-$150k lying around. Most of them got fully or almost fully funded.
But AFAICT, for the vast majority of four-year college students the principal costs of college are not borne by the students themselves. College is typically paid for by a combination of parental contributions, tuition discount and other financial aid from the institution, and perhaps outside grants or scholarships, along with a comparatively small amount of earnings or debt undertaken by the student personally.
I don’t think you have a leg to stand on, realistically speaking, when you try to argue that the average four-year college student is somehow taking a $100K hit in order to finance their own education independently, whether in the form of individual debt or via “paying cash” out of pocket. I know lots of four-year college students, and that ain’t what’s happening in their world.
Yes, I was. The whole pojnt was to show that the ‘average’ college wage premium is a bogus statistic when used to convince someone to go to college without qualifying the claim by school and faculty. And somit is with high school diploma only. The ‘median wage’ for HS grads includes everyone from waitresses to store managers, realtors, etc.
The only reasonable way to evaluate if you should go to college is to look at the faculty you are interested in at the school you can afford or get i to, and compare it to suitable jobs that don’t require a degree, or which only require a 2-year college diploma, or whatever. And money isn’t everything. Many people woild absoluteky hate working in a trade, but would love working behind a desk and are willing to take a pay cut to,do so. More power to them if they can afford it.
But there are now lots of people being shoveled into average schools, taking easy degrees because they have been told that going to college is the path to life success, and it doesn’t much matter what they take. The ‘college premium’ is often used to convince them to go, when it might not even remotely represent the options for a particular student. Trading a career as a tradesman in favor of a humanities degree will earn yiu the opposite of a ‘premium’ - it will likely restrict both your lifetime income and your choices early in life.
If you can get a full ride at Harvard or Johns Hopkins, by all means take it. You are on your way to the good life if you can hack it. Paying your own way through State U. to get a degree in a subject that has little commercial value is fine if you or your parents are rich. But if you are like I was as a student - flat broke with no familial support at all - such a decision can destroy your life, or at oeast set you back for a long time.
And we haven’t even talked about the 57% of college students who don’t finish their degree in six years, or the 33% who fail to ever get a degree. Oh, and I just read that in Canada, only 19% of Ph.D’s in academia are on a tenure track. All the rest are low paid lecturers, adjuncts, temp workers, etc. It’s so bad it’s starting to look like a racket. A friend of mine quit a Ph.D program when he realized that his advisor had no interest in helping him with his thesis, but lots of interest in keeping him around as a low-paid lab monkey and grade marker.
A cost is a cost. If your parents paid it, they coupd have used the money to, say, give you a down payment on a house.
Scholarships, yes. But schlarships overall are not huge. Again, if you went to a top school your experience and that of your cohorts is probably different.
data from the 2015-16 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) and found the following scholarship stats:
1.5% of students in bachelor’s degree programs got enough scholarships and grants to cover 100% of the cost of attendance.
2.7% got enough to cover 90% of the cost of attendance.
5.9% got enough to cover 75% of the cost of attendance.
18.8% received enough to cover 50% of the cost of attendance.
And if you are one of the students I’m talking about - a poor kid who is on the fence about college in the first place - you are much less likelh to be one of the lucky 18.8% who get at least half of college paid for.
There is also opportunity cost. The four to six years spent in college are four to six years of not earning a full-time income, saving money for a house, getting married and having kids early, or whatever.
We didn’t have a kid until I was over 30, because I wasn’t done with school until I was 26 and then I had debts to pay, jobs to find, money to save for a down payment on a house, etc… We bought our first house when Inwas 32. A couple friends who went into trades had far more money, owned houses for years, had a decade of job experience and accrued pension by that time, etc. I did okay because I studied CS, but people I knew in my cohort (poor) took easy degrees and paid a big price. Like my friend at Radio Shack with the Masters in English Lit and big student loans.
You realize that Berkeley is State U, I hope. UCLA? University of Michigan? University of Illinois? UT Austin? And plenty of others.
State colleges and universities are overly expensive since Republicans cut the hell out of state support for tuition.
Famous faculty is great so long as they will talk to undergrads and the undergrads are aggressive enough to chase them down. Plus, a famous faculty member in a department you don’t care about isn’t going to help you.
Advice - find out how many big companies recruit at any particular campus, and go to the one where a company you want to work for recruits. Don’t know this when you’re a high school junior? Harder than it looks, isn’t it.
The NY Times Magazine today had another interesting statistic that is of relevance to this thread.
The number of jobs held by college graduates in April was almost back to its pre-pandemic level. The number of jobs held by those with high school diplomas or less is down by 3.5 million.
Well, not all jobs are the same. The argument is that you can get a well paying job, equivalent to what you would get with a college degree, without one. So telling that group “well, Whattaburger is hiring” is not really equivalent.
There is truth to the idea that while a person without a college degree may work their way up into a good, well-paying position, that position is often more fragile than that of their peers with degrees. You can work your way up one company that promotes from within, but if you get laid off, it can be harder to make a lateral transfer.
Like, I knew a lady who worked her way up from the sales floor to a buyer position for a major department store. But when she got laid off, she was stuck . Other department stores either wanted people that worked their way up that organization, or people with degrees.
My father never went to college, since he grew up so poor that he couldn’t afford the free City College in New York. He got a job as a security guard in the UN in 1946 and worked his way up to an executive position. No layoff problems there. But that would be very difficult to do these days.