Non-paywalled link
It costs too much. $150 for a text book. FFS, higher learning behind a giant paywall.
Only $150us? Where?!
Lol sorry that was my example from 1992
I was going to say…
What is that, a college bookstore fire sale?!
Well, if the years of study, understudy and residency living broke and getting nickel-and-dimed by everyone and everything wasn’t enough, now Americans can come out with a crippling debt several times that takes another bunch of years to pay off, hooray!
Best education in the world! Nobody learns gooder nowhere else
The problem is the perception that having a college education automatically means that you get a high paying job, when the reason that college educated people got paid more was that there were fewer of them. As college education becomes the norm rather than the exception, it just means that more jobs require degrees.
Yeah the article touches on that, as well as the fact that some degrees have you making less (though possibly in a position that is less demanding of your time and/or physicality) than many people without a degree. It also specifically mentions that the benefits are now small enough that the chances of making more have to be weighed against the costs of not finishing or of taking on too much debt for the bump. It then goes into all the ways that the elite schools quietly keep up social barriers (Equestrian scholarships, anyone?). The other big thing is that a sizeable percentage of Republican-leaning people now dismiss college as being nothing more than an indoctrination camp, so that skews the numbers in a weird way. But then, as you say, it remains a basic hurdle to most office jobs or of course to graduate study, hence the rise of nonsense like Liberty University and the continued existence of the University of Phoenix.
We were fortunate enough to be able to invest in a college savings plan for our daughter (yay privilege!), but if we were starting from scratch, I would tell her to try to knock it out of the park in Community College for two years, then apply to a three-tiered set of schools: 2-3 elite places that will open doors (likely off the table when transferring in from CC, but worth it if you can pull it off), the 2-3 best public schools in our state, and 2-3 reputable schools that will be cheapest due to whatever combination of aid, proximity, and in-state tuition brings the bill down. Even with our plan, I’m going to strongly encourage her to use it at a place where it will cover total cost (e.g. 4 years at options 2 and 3 above, no private schools). There is just no more room for romance in choosing your college. Taking out massive debt to go to any place other than those networking factories is just not a prudent economic choice.
While their financial models are a million times more sensible, this is kind of how Europe works already. I’m exaggerating a bit, but if you don’t get into Ox-bridge or the Sorbonne or l’Ecole Polytechnique, then you go to class in an office building somewhere near your flat and you get on with life without carrying crippling levels of debt into the workforce. There’s no pining for the hallowed halls of Oglethorpe University or Siena College.
Key points from the article that I think are worth specifically mentioning:
- The college wage premium still remains high. College educated people earn a lot more money than those who don’t have degrees, on a per hour and per year basis.
- The college wealth premium has shrunk significantly, in that paying tuition and delaying entrance into the workforce is a huge up-front cost that requires much more time in the workforce to recoup, compared to previous generations.
- The variance in outcomes means that even if college is a good financial decision for a majority of students, doesn’t mean that there aren’t an increasing number of graduates for whom going to college sets them back financially. Key factors include school, major, actual out-of-pocket cost of attendance, and, well, parental wealth and socioeconomic status.
Still, college is still worth it if you can attend for cheap (lower-cost schools, financial aid, scholarships, outside tuition assistance, education funds that are tax advantaged if used for education, etc.), if you choose a high earning major, or have the socioeconomic background to take advantage of the additional credential. It’s a tougher bet if you choose a less lucrative major, attend a more expensive school, or might not finish on time. And, unfortunately, it’s a lower-odds bet if you’re not white or rich or both.
The other social and political issues are interesting, but I think it’s still worth maintaining an eye on the return on investment, and making sure that’s clear to everyone making the choice of whether to go to college or not (or whether to encourage kids to go or not).
Not about faith. It is a price/value question. Majority of people never historically went to college anyway.
As the father of a college student, I see a lot of kids going to college for a “college degree” like it’s a token that provides a job. If you ask them what they want to do as a profession when they get out, they don’t have an answer. That’s a fundamental disconnect in the purpose of college. It’s technically the student’s responsibility to determine what they need to become employable, but these young adults simply don’t have the world experience to know what is necessary. Corporations are looking for relatively specific skill sets when hiring, and the average swath of humanities and science degrees doesn’t fulfill those needs. For the price of tuition colleges should be guiding them, but they mostly wash their hands of any post-graduate needs. The system devolves into a gamification of the experience where “success” is navigating the various and sundry graduation requirements and the end result is a degree rather than a person with intellectual skills they can market directly.
That’s not to say college is useless, just misguided. It’s like getting the best tailor in the world for your next public engagement. You and your college/tailor may have produced the finest 17th century Russian ball gown ever seen but now you need to find a 17th century Russian ball; you can’t wear that as an intern to an accounting audit. Not to pick on 17th century Russian gowns, you can’t wear a fabulous business suit (which might be okay for an accounting audit) as crew on a civil engineering/surveying team or at an archeological dig.
All that said, I’m going to go as far as to say a pretty large helping of value should have come from parents or mentors. We, as parents, have spent most of our children’s formative years either entirely ignoring the need to have a focus, or hyperfocusing to the exclusion of a bigger picture. It’s always been this way, of course, but screwing up in college didn’t used to result in life-burdening debt, and parents need to step up a lot earlier.
(apologies for not reading the article, I was determined to be a robot at the capcha)
My son is in his senior year of high school. Every day our mailbox has at least 1 glossy brochure from a college. The other day Yale sent a 100 page one. He’s probably going to study in Europe :p
I regret not studying in Europe, pretty sure most tuition is free in Germany now
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These three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons and Ana Hernández Kent — used the Fed’s survey of thousands of American households to consider the financial advantage that college graduates receive.
Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business.
Douglas Webber, who was a professor at Temple University until he joined the Federal Reserve Board last year as a senior economist, has spent the last decade looking for new ways to calculate the value of a college degree.
What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill.
In July, the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman and David Deming helped illuminate exactly how that system works when they published the most recent in their series of research papers analyzing the intersections of social class and higher education.
More recently, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who served as the chief economist of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, with Tom Lee, a series of papers predicting an even greater shortage: 8.5 million missing American B.A.
Saved 94% of original text.
Value being subjective of course.
I dropped out of college and eventually wound up with a job that pays as good as the job I was previously going to college for, with room to suceed more still.
