Posted on 10/28/2013 4:45:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
The average college graduate holds at least $35,200 of debt and has spent four years out of the workforce, where he or she would be otherwise gaining experience. All this for a piece of paper that by no means guarantees a job. The question that potential and current college students need to ask is: Do the financial costs, opportunity costs, and other factors justify the cost of college? For a select few, the answer may be yes. For a surprising number of people, it will be no.
Does the financial cost justify going to college? It depends on what you want to do in life. If you want to go into medicine (average debt of $170,000, average salary $150,000-$200,000+), law (average debt of $100,433 , average salary $113,310), or engineering (average debt of $52,596 , average salary $91,810) the answer will be yes. This is for two reasons. First, today you cannot work in those fields without a college degree. Second, the average income of those professions quickly pays off debt (assuming you can get the job).
But what about individuals who want to go into art, business, music, humanities, languages, or other fields? The answer will most likely be no. There are alternative options that can prove to be far more useful and financially wiser.
Business students who want to start their own businesses would be far better off leaving the theory back in the classroom and diving in head-first into real-life experience. Most of what an entrepreneur needs to learn can be learned from reading books, taking advantage of free online educational resources like Khan Academy and TED talks, and joining college alternative programs like Praxis. I’ve opened two businesses and I learn more from the few months of work I put into them than all the “professional” education I’ve received from my business classes combined.
Real life is the best teacher there is. The average cost of a specialized music school (one most likely to get students a job) can be $81,000. The average salaries of their graduates is around $29,222. Instead getting of a music degree (and tons of debt along with it), students passionate in music should make their own music and post it on YouTube and sell their music on iTunes or other sites. People like Christina Grimmie and Lindsey Stirling have proven the model works, without college.
For learning music, a personal tutor or teaching yourself by using online tools can be just as effective as paying for a college degree. Instead of spending tens of thousands for a degree in philosophy, history or political science, go to Amazon.com and buy a dozen books for a hundred or so dollars and join an online book club to discuss what you read and learn. Or, write a blog or join a forum site to have conversations with other interested individuals. Go other sites like iTunes U if you want to hear lectures from experts for free!
There are cheap and free alternatives to learning the same things you would earn if you went to college and spent tens of thousands on and went into debt for. And this way you can pick exactly what you want to study, study at your own pace and not waste time on pointless projects.
What about the other benefits of going to college, the networking, the friends, the “college experience” and getting a degree to get a job? This may be the best justification for going to college, but it’s still not that strong. Most people who graduate from college get a job not because they have a degree, but because they met someone who was able to get them in the door at a company for an interview. But you can meet people at networking events that are held all over the country!
Go to trade shows or industry conferences and network with people there to get a job. Employers are dying for employees with real life experience (I know I am for my businesses). If you can prove that you can do the real life work, they will over look the absent piece of paper. Most people end up working in fields they don’t major in. This is because employers don’t care about your major, but care about what you can do.
If you feel “the college experience” is worth massive debt, go for it. If you want to save money, go further in your profession, and start your life early, then rethink going to college. There are so many alternatives that are offered thanks to the freedom of the internet it’s a shame not to take advantage of them. Degrees don’t make you standout anymore, experience does. Get out of the classroom and get started on your real life.
This concept has been drilled into our heads that a college education is a must in order to live a normal life in America today.
Every Presidential speech or State of the Union always includes that old cheer-leading pep talk about how “folks should be able to send their kids to college” and many other platitudes.
Debt be damned! What me worry Alfred E. Newman? The college loan program (that went bust decades ago) is a way of taking away personal responsibility for students and their families. Attend now, party today, pay later, live the collegiate life now.
No, I think we've come too far, made too many promises, attached too much importance to an undergraduate degree to call the whole thing off now.
How can we alter this monstrous concept in an age of entitlements? It's worse now than when I graduated in 1982!
How can the clock be turned back. This is like asking the government or private sector to stop over spending, stop living the good life when you do not have the funds to back it up. Nope, we're used to “having it all”.
Try taking away these “rights” and you'll get full scale revolution similar to what we saw at the Wall Street rallies - the Left, unhinged.
We are paying high priced progressive socialist reprogramers to undue what we have taught them at home through thier eary years and to program them into following instead of leading, those who do want to lead must follow the agenda or be cast out
Actually, if I had it to do over again, I would have not gone to college. I would instead have learned a trade like plumbing and started my own business.
Today, if you are not enrolled in college in a worthwhile science-based discipline, your chances of employment and worth are diminished and the effort is likely not worth it. Your only option is a government job - as long as that option still remains.
Education viewed as an economic proposition does not always win the calculation.
What if you pulled Gannon Leblanc’s analysis back 4 years and had everyone enter the workforce at 14? Then you could get four more years of work in the mills, and present value them from an early age.
Society would save all that stupid education expenditure AND get taxes from the teenaged workers who would have a lot of energy.
Education viewed as an economic proposition does not always win the calculation.
What if you pulled Gannon Leblanc’s analysis back 4 years and had everyone enter the workforce at 14? Then you could get four more years of work in the mills, and present value them from an early age.
Society would save all that stupid education expenditure AND get taxes from the teenaged workers who would have a lot of energy.
Or, by transforming college.
That is, additional school beyond high school that is related to learning hands on how to work in a lab or perform specific functions on a computer or many many other fairly specific hands on jobs. That is , trade schools.
In our area the industry demanded and assisted State schools are doing just that and producing what the local industries require. Additionally, there is some English and Math thrown in to assure minimum skill level.
The biggest and best such school has grown by leaps and bounds and has taken students away from the local university where many would have enrolled and dropped out. Students alwayshave the option of continuing their education when they graduate from the trade school.
I agree with you about trade schools. Far too many go to college to “pursue my passion” instead of having a goal to make a good living.
I recently read an article about a jobless Museum Science major that was thrilled to get a $12,000/year position with a museum in Dumas, TX. That’s about as close to bum-f**k Egypt as you can get for a $7.80/hour job.
As a University graduate, my first answer is ‘No’ and my second answer is ‘Hell, No!’
And this is from someone, who actually thought he was taking a useful degree when I went in, namely in the biological sciences. How was I to know that I would be finishing my M.Sc. several months before Wall Street looted all the banks, and that I was about to get the double whammy of my degrees suddenly becoming as worthless as dirt, and at the same time making me almost unemployable?
/and no, I’m not looking for sympathy - it was my own fault for being a stupid rube that fell for the lies of the snake oil salesmen of so-called ‘higher education’.
Great to see this is working and may serve as a model for the future. Thanks.
You have a M.Sc.in the Biological Sciences and can’t find work? This is absurd. You need to move from your current area, (state) and find what suits you. There HAVE to be jobs out there for your field.
$35,000 for a college education? What community college is that? Try $160,000... if you make it through in only four years.
Likely, he/she would make more money memorizing this phrase, “Do you want fries with that?” LOL
I guess thankfully for us, unions hate competition from young, energetic workers and teacher's unions are powerful enough to guarantee jobs for gobs of high school teachers.
And the SAD part: most people are not suitable for college. Back in the late 70’s, when I was an undergrad, we lost ~40% of our freshmen by Junior year. That was EXPECTED.
Nowadays, trade schools are mostly gone, supplanted by Community Colleges, that STILL pad curricula with useless “distribution” requirements that are merely there to support departments and faculty headcount. . .
Well it was worth it to me and my wife. When I got out of the Army in 72 I went to work for the Sheriff’s Department I also pumped wells on the side and started working towa5rds a degree as a Petroleum Engineer. After 5 1/2 years I went to work full time pumping wells for my buddy who is now my business partner. It was hard with a wife and a child but I got my degree in 79. In 80 My wife went back to school and got her BSRN. Both of these degree’s have worked well for us and to be honest I might have been able to get to where I am now with out it, but it would have been a much steeper hill to climb. I’m also proud to say we never took a loan or a grant, we just did what we could afford, it takes longer but when I look around at what the kids are going through now, it was the best decision we could have made.
I’d say that would depend on the degree.
As an engineering graduate of Virginia Tech, I find that sad. I think there should always be room in our society and our economy for those with a liberal arts background. Although, I suppose when the economy has been destroyed by corrupt nanny-staters and "progressives", we must take a back-to-basics approach to things. The average person can survive without novels, poetry, philosophers, the theater, etc. It's much tougher without such things as food, drinking water, medical care and electricity.
And of course, there IS the fact that it is currently almost impossible to find a classic university at which to seek said well-rounded classical education. Political correctness and "progressivism" have seen to that.
I think it is incredibly ironic that the classic 'liberal arts education' has, over the last 50 years or so, been all but eliminated from higher education in this country by the very Liberals who allegedly cherish it. They have virtually destroyed the ability of the average liberal arts major to make a good living in their field of interest by assuring that the overwhelming majority of people graduating our universities with liberal arts degrees are progressive- indoctrinated, mush-brained automatons, incapable of independent thought and unable to formulate a logical argument.
It turns out that there is very little demand for a biology major outside of medicine and biomedical engineering. And even someone planning to go to Med School is better off simply taking the pre-requisite science courses, and skipping courses like Evolution, Animal Behavior, Coastal Environs, Plant Physiology, and, surprisingly even seemingly related fields such as Comparative Morphology. (CompMorph is no substitute for Basic Anatomy, so don’t bother with it, unless you want to be a research biologist.)
So, does this mean you’re not working in your chosen field? All that work, money, study and you’re not in the field?
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