Let’s take the debts out of the equation. Is getting a college education worthless nowadays?
Even from people who graduated and found a job, I hear a lot of negativity. This sums up most fo what I hear. Basically all I hear is:
it’s become some kind of racket.
It’s become interested in itself more than its students
You graduate in something but find a job in something else completely unrelated
Good for networking though
What are your experiences?
It depends. What do you want to get out of college? What are your expectations?
Also which college and what will you be studying?
‘‘College’’ is such a broad and vague term I’d be hard-pressed to generalize.
My knee-jerk response is that college is a total racket. It’s a profit-driven system and colleges will tell prospective students just about anything they want to hear to get them to attend. Many students will find that their academic degrees are not equivalent to professional skills training and in today’s economy they may find it difficult to find a job. A lot of kids get stuck in the ‘‘need experience to find a job, need a job to get experience’’ trap. Academia can be a complete clusterfuck of hyper competitive pressure and time demands and it’s not uncommon for an adjunct professor with a Ph.D. to make in the $30k range for a salary, while dealing with the stress of no job security on top of that. Only a very small percentage of Ph.Ds go on to reach tenure. That’s not even touching on the insane amounts of debt most students take on.
A lot of the potential damage, however, can be mitigated with wise decisions. Pursuing a degree that you know is marketable, and that has a high probability of leading to a specific profession, makes a good first step. Making sure you are getting internship experience while you’re still in college is also a good step. Many people wisely avoid taking on too many loans by working their way through school, which comes at a great personal sacrifice in the short term but I would imagine has some excellent long term outcomes. Another option is attending community college for a couple of years in undergrad and then transferring to that big-name university to finish.
Overall, I would say that a college degree is not nearly as valuable as it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it has no value. I do feel quite strongly that as a means of economic mobility it’s not always the best option, and should not necessarily be considered the default, or for its own sake. An education should be a part of a solid career plan, not just, ‘‘Well, I’m going to do this because I probably should, even though I don’t really know what I’m doing.’’
Now all of that leaves aside the value of education in and of itself, not as a means to an end or a financial investment. On that front I’d say education is a worthwhile endeavor.
For a little context, I entered college in 2001, with a foundation of belief that getting a good college education was a virtual guarantee of success. I was taught that ‘‘school debt is good debt’’ (THIS IS A LIE. No debt is good debt.) I graduated undergrad in 2007, right around the time the economy tanked, and of course in that economic landscape all of that optimistic horseshit about chasing your passion was looking a lot less relevant. I graduated with a professional masters in 2011 and was very unemployed for a while. Sr. Weasel, meanwhile, has been in graduate school for 7 years and please don’t get me started. I don’t regret either of my educational experiences, I am in fact chasing my passion, but I still have loads of debt and no longer am operating under the delusion that a degree is a magic ticket to professional success, and while I think I made the right decision for me it’s a lot less clear-cut for each individual.
Best advice: Be smart, make a plan. You can always change the plan. But have one.
you might go to increase your earning potential.
you might go to learn how to think, reason and learn while also increasing your knowledge on some subjects.
some people value what it does for your brain.
If you go, make absolutely sure they don’t mix up your paperwork. There was another student at my college with the same first and last name as me. When he dropped out, it went on my record. It took a ridiculous amount of work to fix that. A few months later, his loans showed up on MY credit report. (I know it was a massive mistake because I never took out any loans)
I hear they can learn you how to rite. And how to read.
Well, I have a master’s degree in something most people consider useless (history), but just having a degree opens up the door to jobs that aren’t food service, retail or manual labor. So that right there makes it worth it to me. And while I’m not working directly in my field, the writing and research skills I learned as a history major have served me well in the legal field.
Outside of that, I believe a college education gives you the ability to think critically, exposes you to different types of people and other viewpoints, and generally makes you a more well-rounded person. So yes, it was absolutely worth it for me.
For profit colleges are indeed pretty much worthless, unless you have so much motivation you can get into a real one. Charging too much is not the same as being profit-driven.
The data shows that the gap between college and non-college is large and getting larger, and unemployment rates for non-college are higher. Yeah, if someone has a skill and can get into the trades they might do well.
Not all PhDs teach or care about tenure. I have a PhD in computer science and have never been unemployed in 34 years and am doing quite well, thank you.
My daughter has a PhD in Marketing and is making more than $30K as a post doc, and will make quite a bit more when she gets a job. And I know our starting salaries for MS and PhD hires. Pretty damn high
So let’s not make the OP depressed until he tells us what he is interested in.
To address the “you graduate in something but find a job in something completely unrelated.”
My first degree is Art History. There aren’t exactly a lot of paying jobs for someone with a B.A. to analyze Film Noir from a Freudian and Marxist perspective. So I got a job as a sys admin, and eventually as a project manager, and eventually as a manager (and now as a PM again because I got soured quickly on the people part of managing).
I might have gotten the first job without college - although its doubtful. I wouldn’t have gotten the successive roles. There is something to be said for “with a lot of jobs, its the degree that matters, not the major.”
As a manager, college screens in a few ways. You can put up with red tape and bullshit. You have been presumably taught to think, and you’ve had the persistence to graduate. (A few years in the military will screen for similar but slightly different traits). It isn’t 100% - some yahoos manage to graduate without learning persistence or how to think, but its an initial screen - and there doesn’t tend to be a shortage of applicants who fail that initial screen.
A degree in Art may not return the benefits that perhaps a degree in nursing would. It all demands on the school and the major.
There are only 4 institutions of higher education that I know will guaranty you a job when you graduate meeting all requirements. One is in Maryland, one in New York, one in Colorado, and one in Connecticut.
As much as I like to think myself the autodidact smartypants, college was vital in getting me to where I am today. Not just because of the signaling device that is my diploma. I simply would have never learned what I needed to learn otherwise.
Could it have worked out the same or better at a cheaper school? It’s hard to say.
If I hadn’t gone to college – finally, as it took me several years to get around to it – I’d probably still be stuck in my old dead-end convenience-store job in Bumfuck, West Texas. As it turned out, college opened a whole lot of doors, most of them completely unrelated even to what I officially studied. I doubt I’d have ever seen the world. I’d certainly never have met my future wife in Hawaii. So it can be worth it in many nonmonetary ways too.
Your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.
If you can go where you want and study what you want, sure. Otherwise, maybe not so much. There isn’t one answer to this.
I didn’t like college very much, yet things have turned out great for me. How could I sort out all the causal links in my actual life, let alone comparing that to various alternate realities? It’d be like un-scrambling an egg.
Thomas college in Maine does this too.
Concise post. And edited. 
Just this weekend I was chatting with a college buddy of mine who has to hire/fire people (from entry level to management) as part of his job. He observed the presence of College on a resume has statistically no more bearing on one’s ability to read/write/communicate in general than four years as a McDonald’s fry cook. We’ve all seen this–complete idiots with degrees, naturally observant leaders who dropped out of high school. College is worth it if you’re the type of person who will make it worth it. Otherwise, it’s a 4+ year delay of your appearance as just another cog into the capitalist machine. And now you’ve got a massive debt around your neck.
If you want to become educated, find a college that will do that, be prepared to pay, and don’t expect your degree to be the magic door-opening key–you get this kind of education because it makes the world bigger for you. But unless you’re going for a targeted degree, and you need to be confident that what is relevant when you start is STILL relevant and in demand 4 years later, it’s not much value unless you focus on networking. Make as many friends as you can, and be remembered in the right way.
All good advice. One more thing to add: choose a school that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Paying out-of-state tuition to a top-tier school for an undergraduate degree is probably not the wisest investment, whether paying out of savings or paying with a student loan. Choose a school with lower costs, perhaps something in-state, or something in an adjacent state that offers tuition reciprocity, and it will help keep the costs under control. Hand in hand with that is the advice to live cheaply while you’re in college, especially if you’re taking out loans. If you’re enjoying a $4 latte from Starbucks every morning, that’s $1500 per year; by the time you graduate after four years of living like that, not only will you have to pay back that $1500, you’ll be paying $300 per year in interest. Get a cheap apartment a mile from campus, drive as little as you can (carpool with friends to buy groceries), ride a bicycle or walk as much as you can; your wallet and your physiology will be better off for it.
I watched Ivory Tower recently. It was pretty interesting. Tuition costs have been rising pretty rapidly in the 25+ years since I graduated high school, making the above advice all the more important.
Beyond that, there are a lot of kids who probably should not be going to a four-year college, and some others who ought to wait a year or two until they have matured more and have more definite ideas of what they want to do. With the “college is a great choice for everyone” meme in the past couple of decades, many people have gone to college who probably shouldn’t have, and racked up massive student debt while delivering poor academic performance, pursuing a degree that offers poor return on investment, and ultimately dropping out with massive student loan debt.
For many people, yes, a college degree is worth it, if it is pursued smartly.
Every job description I’ve looked at in the last 15 years has said " Bachelor’s degree in stuff or equivalent work experience." If you don’t have the degree, you can’t get that first job. Without that first job, you can’t get the work experience. Ergo, a college degree is required to get a start in the industry unless you are extremely lucky. A friend of mine, who put herself most of the way through college working as a secretary and personal admin, found herself trying to find work a couple decades later (without a degree) and found that, without a BA in at least something, people wouldn’t even look at her resume for a job sitting at the front desk answering the phones. To be fair, if they did look at her resume, they said she was over-qualified. Go figure.