Posted on 05/16/2011 12:58:50 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The majority of Americans think that college is not worth it.
57% of the general public thinks the U.S. higher education system fails when it comes to providing students with good value for their money, according to a new Pew Research Center study.
The report is based on a telephone survey of 2,142 American adults ages 18 and over, and an online survey of 1,055 college presidents.
However, adults who did not earn a bachelor's degree feel as though they would be making $20,000 more per year if they had gone to college. This estimate matches the Census report's annual earning gap between a high school and a college graduate of $19,550.
And, 94% of parents surveyed expect their kids to go to college, college enrollments have reached record levels, and the majority of college graduates said their education helped them grow intellectually.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
It's an individual kinda choice.
Some do better going to a trade school.
I would say that its very bad in outlook across all academic majors, even computer science (China/India anyone?). Law students are getting shafted as they borrowed 150k to attend law school and now have to compete with 100k law grads every year. Computer science students and their physics brethren aren’t fairing well either.
I fully expect our commie-in-chief to implement some kind of “bailout” for these loans if the trend continues.
There is really no excuse for a school like NYU to be charging $200,000 for a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies or art history. It’s even more inexcusable for NYU to be letting people borrow to finance that overpriced degree.
If student loan debt is made dischargeable in bankruptcy, there will no longer an incentive for lenders and schools to put students so deep in debt that they’ll never be able to pay it back. If student debt were put on the same plane as other consumer debt, i.e. dischargeable in bankruptcy, lenders would be a lot more careful, and that in turn would put appropriate pressure on the colleges to bring their costs in line with the value of the education.
/flame-retardant suit on
My daughter goes off to college in 2012. If she listened and learned from her parents so that indoctrination will be difficult to impossible, then it will pay off. If she gets out wearing a “Che” shirt then I’ll know it didn’t.
>Some do better going to a trade school.<
One of my older brother’s buds was enrolled as a Comp Sci frosh at university. The registrar screwed up and gave him the plumbing and maintenance curriculum for their “smaller” extension school and he was livid. The registrar explained it will take a week to find another slot so he went to the tech school for 1 class. He listened and liked it.
He attended the 2nd class while the office was looking for a slot for him, and he liked what he was hearing. Fast forward 10 years later, he holds the maintenance contracts for 30 apartment buildings and a staff who does the job for him.
Reminds me of a joke I once heard years ago. A man was talking about his ten children. Three were lawyers, three were engineers and three were doctors. When asked about the tenth he said "Oh my first born son, he is a plumber, he put the other nine through college.".
Ref. #3 post.
I hated school. I hated college. When I got my MBA it was a total love affair. I wish it had gone on forever. Working and studying at the same time was tiring. I didn’t care. I would wake up in the morning with books keeping me company in bed, books I was reading in bed but fell asleep on top of them.
I would do it all over again in a flash.
I loved it!!!
RE: There is really no excuse for a school like NYU to be charging $200,000 for a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies or art history. It’s even more inexcusable for NYU to be letting people borrow to finance that overpriced degree.
Well, as I see it, the DEMAND side exists, therefore the SUPPLY side provides. NYU would not bother hiring teachers to teach these flak courses if students did not bother to enroll, BUT THEY DO.
Which means that NYU finds it WORTH offering these courses.
These students must be really STUPID or must have really rich parents.
Actually, in many regions of the U.S., companies practically fight over computer science graduates.
What is off-shored is mostly low-level coding. Indian companies that handle a lot of off-shoring have actually opened centers in the U.S. to get good higher-level technical skills, the kind you get from a true computer science degree (not so much from management information systems or training programs aimed at particular languages and certifications). Indians who come to the U.S. to study computer science usually find jobs here, not back in India. (One I know just started here at $60K, so these aren’t green-card sweatshop jobs.)
Alas, most of the public who think they know about computing (even many programmers) don’t even know what computer science is. Employers are much more clued in about this.
Otherwise, it's a skewed result. Since WikiP says only 38% of U.S. population have a bachelors degree/diploma, then I'm not surprised at this poll that may be displaying an "animosity factor" by virtue of the greater majority who never attended, or attended but flunked out. (You pretty well need a bachelors before a masters and doctorate.... which is why I used the Wiki bachelors figure alone)
Average IQ is 100 ... For about 105 and below, college is a waste.
College is a chick thing.
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