Well, are you one of those who are crying about 6 figures of debt and 6 years of wasted life while working at Starbucks and praying for ‘government’ to erase all your problems? No? The discussion is about how to fund what is in essence an economic investment. Just like k-12 are. Of course, many people who go through school aren’t utilizing all that they have learned directly. I’m not sure how that’s relevant with regards to pay for and extract utility from an institution designed to provide that.
Maybe, but relatively few high schools have the rigor that should be considered typical in college, and few high schoolers are trying to navigate the independence that comes with being out on your own, while the problem with learning soft skills in the workplace is finding mentors who have the time and skill (and interest!) to give feedback and constructive criticism.
If you can do well in constructing strong, compelling arguments in your medieval lit term papers, then you can probably do well in constructing strong, compelling arguments while writing grant proposals or the myriad reports required in many areas of business, or law school briefs, or any of the other kinds of advocacy. Many organizations require people who can read and synthesize masses of data, for example in marketing or regulatory compliance. Those aren’t college majors; those are skills gained in the pursuit of some major, and those are skills that are valuable to business and government.
Neither doctor nor lawyer is an undergraduate degree, at least in the US, and the most popular undergraduate majors for law students are the traditional liberal arts: political science, history, English, psychology, economics, and so forth. These are the majors that emphasize reading and writing and reasoning, skills that stand lawyers in great stead. Those same majors tend to produce good medical school applicants: while a bachelor’s degree in biology or chemistry are the most popular, medical school admissions offices say that as long as the basic prerequisites are met, a degree in the history of art is quite acceptable preparation for med school, and the Princeton Review recommends pre-med students consider majors as diverse as Economic or Spanish.
I went to community college because I didn’t want to saddle myself with debt. Even at 18 I didn’t want to mortgage my future in that way. I do not come from a family with money, the best I could get was some help from all my relatives to pay for my first set of books at school.
I paid for college by working part time in a minimum wage job, and even that didn’t last all that long. I was not eligible for scholarships (despite being an honors student in high school) and was also not eligible for a Pell Grant. I went to school for as long as I could until it literally got to a point where I had to choose between tuition and having a place to live, and eventually I even ended up without a place to live for a while.
I turned out just fine in the long run; I make really good money, lots of job security, and all doing what I love. I built up skills and taught myself and now decades later I have kids with degrees asking me to give them a chance to be where I’m at (either as a hiring manager or as an interview panelist). In retrospect I probably didn’t need any college at all. But you can’t always get away with that in every field. I don’t think college is a scam but it’s also not a necessity, not most of the time.
In retrospect I have to thank 18-year-old me for being cautious. I don’t think my path getting to where I am today would have been any easier with a degree, and if I had crushing financial debt on top of everything I am scared to think of how I would have ended up. Even when I was flat broke, at least I didn’t have negative wealth at any point.
ETA: I totally plan to do everything I can to support my kids getting a higher education. I make enough money I can do that. I’d love to give them something I couldn’t have, even if it was something I didn’t need.
My high school was harder than my college til my junior year. My major was engineering and high school physics was more rigorous than freshman physics and AP English was far more rigorous than any sophomore level class where it seemed like 1/2 the class was literate.
When one pays for education you need to be concerned with the ROI. Writing a so-called grant for a non profit is typically not worth 6 figures of debt. Working in the trades would be much more economically wise, so when it comes to deciding who should pay for this huge expense via borrowing it’s essential to know if it’s worth borrowing money for it to begin with.
High school education used to signal sufficient market value. Social demands to dumb down a high school diploma means the signal that it once provided has been devalued.
It’s not the degree, it’s the plan, or at least the sense that one needs a plan. I have an English degree (the horror) and I’ve supported myself perfectly well without a single second of unemployment for two decades. Because I had a plan . . .be an English teacher. I know people with much more “practical” degrees who have struggled because they had no plan and no sense of what a plan would even be. They treated college like nothing but a series of classes, never taking part in the community, getting to know anyone except in a purely social way, and we’re not even aware of career services or anything. They graduate in May and THEN start to think about a job. They know no one.
Kids in college absolutely need to be thinking more about the future. They need to be pursuing internships and networking. They need to work the career services department at their university and make sure they leave school with a job that’s going somewhere. They need to be building skills in and out of the classroom, and see a path forward.
Ironically, those things I just listed are exactly what is normal at fancy private schools and sadly missing that your Local State U. And they are so much more important than the specific subject you major in.
Honestly, I’d be fine with some level of scrutiny on student loans. But the question shouldn’t be “what is your major?”, but rather, “what is your plan?”.
Mine didn’t.
Being a professional grant writer for a non-profit, a government agency, or a business can be a stable career–that WAS the object here, wasn’t it? While the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t keep statistics on grant writing as a career field, anecdotal evidence suggests salaries average $50-70K/year. (I am going to assume your snide remark about “writing a so-called grant for a non profit” was an attempt at humor, and that you are well aware that plenty of organizations other than non-profits employ grant writers.)
Working in the trades might be more wise, if you have the aptitude and physical requirements for it, but it’s no guarantee. For example, the average salary of a journeyman plumber in the US ranges from $40 to $76K/year, AFTER a four- to six-year apprenticeship at a much lower salary. A lot of plumbers also work in the construction industry, and are therefore subject to the cyclical nature thereof, with often lengthy periods on unemployment.
I understand why you think this. These days, many managers want to hire people with the exact skills they need, so they don’t have to go through the bother of teaching them. Then they can toss them out the door in 10 years and hire a new batch.
None of the concrete things I learned at MIT in Computer Science (practical enough for you?) were the slightest bit relevant 30 years later. The theory was. How to address problems was. How to do research was.
The Medieval Lit major who learns how to do research and to write complex papers logically and well will do nicely in life. Few enough people can write these days, including engineers. I’ve reviewed enough engineering papers to know that.
BTW, while finance will be a solid subject, most of what business majors learn is soft also. Like marketing. So let’s not forget them.
Perfectly said. I was getting distracted with the details and didn’t emphasize the main point. When it comes to any sort of borrowing a financial calculation and plan need to be in place to determine if it’s reasonable. After that is concluded, who pays for it can be debated.
I think you’re misreading slash2k. “soft skill” doesn’t mean “liberal arts” - it means skill having to do with the process of learning and communicating, vice specific know-how. A successful doctor, lawyer or engineer between learn those skills - the medical, legal, and engineering skills he or she learned at college have an expiration date - but learning how to think, learn, and communicate what you know doesn’t. I have a couple of engineering degrees, and I work in engineering - but virtually none of what I learned in engineering classes 30 years ago is directly applicable to what I do today - but in college I learned how to learn more stuff, so I am able to keep up with my field today. Furthermore, I learned to write clearly in my philosophy courses more than in my engineering courses - so when someone at work wants to make a point clearly to a customer, they come to me for help.
I was an English major, too. And I ended up in IT for over 40 years. Writing literary analysis forced me to think logically and research and support my theses. A lot of kids I worked with coming out of college with CompSci degrees knew the technology, but had trouble working with users and interpretting data in a non-technical sense. I was in demand by the business clients because I could communicate with them.
I agree. I’ve done well for myself and I have seen more of the world most have. Plus I run my own life, my own business, and I haven’t worked 40 hours a week in over twenty years (how do you think I’ve racked up 50K+ posts here? 
) I was an English major. I’m professionally a photographer. I would never trade those four years of college for a more targeted degree to “improve my market value.” I don’t give a shit about how my choice of major confers on me my “market value,” but I learned much in college from the people I went to school with and the extracurriculars that I did (which is how I got into photography.) Similarly, the most affluent person in my cohort was a journalism major (which is not what you get into if you want to improve your market value) and has gone on to do photography and cinema at the highest levels – he’s never taken a photo, cinema, or business course in his life. Another was a history major and ended up running a construction company. Another has been the vice president of a company since he was 25; another history major – got out of school, worked for Anderson Consulting, got into a courtroom jury consulting somehow, does better for himself than most of the econ grads I know. I can go on and on, especially if I add all the rich lawyers with “soft” undergrad degrees. A few have gone on to great careers in the foreign service.
We all utilize our college experiences in different ways. There’s nothing wrong with majoring in liberal arts. College shouldn’t only about “increasing market value” through degree selection. You can do that in many ways if you’re motivated and smart. I hate this attitude that college majors are to be selected only for economic purposes. If you want to do that, great. That’s a great plan for you. If you don’t, that doesn’t mean you’ll be relegated to flipping burgers for the rest of your life.
Correct. But that wasn’t my point which is why I talked about chemistry degrees. There are a whole pile of useless degrees that only teach soft skills that you need additional schooling to give you hard skills that make you valuable. Sure the lit major can write grants that skill is interchangeable with the history major or hundreds of other majors. Those skills are valuable in the sense that they are worth more then a high school diploma but they are not valuable like degrees that teach hard skills. Many undergraduate degrees require advanced degrees to gain hard skills that are valuable but there are also many that lead directly to career.
Teaching is a hard skill but one that isn’t overly valuable for some reason.
You must not actually work as an engineer. The mechanics of materials hasn’t changed in 30 years or thermodynamics or most of the basic principles of engineering. Sure which CAD program you use (or even using one) has changed but there is a reason 3 out of 4 years of the engineering program is required to be fundamentals. Then again I do know a lot of “engineers” who can’t do their job without look-up-tables and couldn’t guess if their math was an order of magnitude off, hell, I had one argue with me you could change the radius if a circle without changing the diameter.
Those fundamental classes are the hard skills that allow engineers to break down problems and build solutions from their component solutions. Sure the latest technology you learn in school is obsolete a decade later but I would hope no one is saying the knowledge of a single programming language is the hard skills of a comp Sci degree. An example of a hard skill is the ability to speak, read, and translate a language, being fluent in a second language that is in demand is a very valuable hard skill. Teaching is another hard skill, I’m certainly not saying that STEM are the only majors teaching hard skills (the main reason I selected chemistry as my example of a soft skill major) but the degrees that specifically train you for a degree are better then the degrees that “teach you how to learn”.
My college cost the equivalent of a BMW per year. Not counting the cost of the actual BMW my room mate drove through a highway sign.
Sorry - I do work as an engineer. I use various computer languages, none of which I learned in college, and analyze the performance of equipment that I didn’t even know existed when I was in college, using techniques (Kalman filtering, for example), that I’d never heard of in college. If I hadn’t known how to learn, I’d have been in bad shape.
Then I think you’re using “hard skill” in a different way than I was.
You mentioned law as a “hard skill,” which confused me - the lawyers I listen to tell me that what law school does is teach you how to think like a lawyer - because the laws will differ from place to place and change over time, but knowing how to analyze a legal situation (how to think) is always necessary. It’s possible we’re talking past each other, in which case, I apologize.
I spent four years not getting a degree in Film Studies and made six figures a year in IT. My husband spent four years not getting a degree in Anthropology and makes mid-six figures as one of the world’s foremost experts on application development - he flies all over the world to speak. And since I semi-retired - I travel with him. (We have both since completed degrees - I switched mine to Accounting - he finished his last year under lockdown).
Both of us have made significant career gains through being able to research, analyze, deconstruct and present data - which you better believe a liberal arts degree teaches you to do.
And most of my friends were liberal arts majors - and most of them are similarly well employed (except the Trust Fund Kid - he is still living off the Trust Fund).
I have a friend from high school who got a biochemistry degree. According to her, getting a bachelors in biochemistry qualified her for lab tech jobs, usually with animal experiments. She ended up switching to IT, without getting an additional BS. A bachelors in chemistry may be similar, minus the eye bleeds.
You may be thinking of chemical engineering.
How exactly are you defining “hard skills” versus “soft skills”?
To me, teaching is a set of soft skills: managing, planning, communicating, assessing, and so on. Meanwhile, hard skills would be things like programming in Java, or using Load and Resistance Factor Design methodology to create a bridge. Hard skills require specific technical knowledge, while soft skills cross domains. Knowledge of a specific programming language is a hard skill that employers want, while knowledge of a foreign language is a soft skill that can be used by teachers and accountants and cops and programmers and lawyers. Hard skills are immediately valuable to an employer but have no staying power, whereas an elementary-ed major who knows how to convey information to the bored and the distracted would probably make an excellent corporate trainer.
Slash1972, no offense but you really don’t understand how student loans work, do you?
Most students from less advantageous households get by university with a combination of work, grants, scholarships and loans. Government loans or guaranteed loans are the best as these are generally low interest and don’t need to start a repayment until 6 months after graduation (or longer).
The basic premise is that a University educated person is likely to make more money than someone with a high school education. Therefore, while having an unproven credit history and zero assets, college students as a class are a good loan risk. And there can be government guarantees to the financial institutions that mitigate some of that risk.
I should point out that as a group even junior college or trade school graduates typically earn more and therefore are a reasonable loan risk. Shyster “For Profit” schemes like Trump University basically exist to promise students great paying jobs after graduation while coercing those same students to take out onerous commercial loans.
I lived in poverty throughout university, worked part time minimum wage jobs, and when I graduated, I owed about $10k in 1985 or about $25k today.
First, you’ve left out one huge factor in increasing college costs: state legislatures slashed funding to state schools between 2008 and 2018, foisting more of the burden on paying for college onto students.
Second, I’ve been retired almost 5 years. In my tourist town, almost all teens had jobs: flipping burgers, cleaning hotel rooms, waiting tables. Nationally, the teen employment rate is down, but not due to laziness, but for these reasons, according to Pew:
•fewer low-skill, entry-level jobs, such as sales clerks or office assistants, than in decades past
• more schools ending in late June and/or restarting before Labor Day
•more students enrolled in high school or college over the summer
•more teens doing volunteer community service as part of their graduation requirements or to burnish their college applications
• more students taking unpaid internships (which the BLS doesn’t count as jobs)
Finally, I wish we’d stop this nonsense about the popularity of frivolous majors. It’s just not true. Look at the 25 most popular majors, and you won’t find underwater basket weaving. A few–history or art, for example, might seem like fluff, but they’re not. History, poli sci, English are common majors for students planning on law school, for instance. Art majors often become graphic artists, tech designers, etc… Business, health professions, engineering, physical sciences, bio–all highly popular.