Posted on 12/21/2021 6:58:57 AM PST by karpov
"Almost all students cite getting a better job as a primary reason for attending college,” writes Preston Cooper in the opening paragraph of his new study, entitled Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis. He refers to an annual survey by UCLA that found that the percentage of incoming freshmen who state that “getting a better job” is a “very important reason for attending college” rose dramatically from 67.8 percent in 1976 to 87.9 percent in 2012.
If this overwhelming emphasis on career training is the case—and there is no reason to doubt it—then higher education has a big problem, according to the findings of Cooper’s study. For he discovered that the return on investment (ROI) for an alarmingly high percentage of college degree programs is either negative or negligible. Higher education is simply not meeting expectations for too many young people who choose to start their adult lives by attending college.
Cooper defines ROI as “the increase in lifetime earnings minus the costs of college,” and examined nearly 30,000 bachelor’s degree programs. And “over a quarter of programs have negative ROI,” he wrote.
To be sure, that means that students who pursue degrees in those programs are most likely worse off financially than if they had never attended college at all but had instead pursued other paths coming out of high school.
Initially using a simple measure of ROI that contrasts the expected lifetime earnings of high school graduates with those of college graduates, Cooper found a median ROI for all college “students who graduate on time” of $306,000. But Cooper added an extra step to account for the fact that many students drop out of degree programs without gaining any skills or credentials that increase ROI.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
I’ve lost count of how many gender- and grievance-studies majors I haven’t hired over the years.
Come on Man, I am just about to get my degree in Lesbian Dance Theory and now you say there may not be any jobs for that field?? Hard to believe, at least I can fall back on my degree in underwater basket weaving if I need to...
The study would have been more useful had more majors been included.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a college education in and of itself.
There is something inherently wrong with college education...today.
They are centers of indoctrination and brainwashing, taking in money from stupid and gullible people to get useless degrees in grievance studies, and those that get degrees in STEM fields are suspect.
The article only does a few majors at North Carolina Schools, You have to follow the link in the article to a horribly designed webpage to find the uncompiled data for more schools and majors
See
https://freopp.org/is-college-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-1b2ad17f84c8
Here’s the real secret: Go get ANY cheap college degree, spend the least, graduate in 2 years or less, and then go get a corporate job. Payback is guaranteed to be high, very high.
Companies are retarded in that they simply want a degree for high paying jobs, so get one. No real skills needed. If you can organize a sock drawer you can organize 99% of the companies out there. That’s all the corporate job want; someone to schedule and attend meetings, make suggestions, brainstorm stupid ideas, do some menial reports, and play the corporate woke games. That’s it.
College can pay off, but not if you overspend or take too much time to graduate.
To both our surprise, merely on the basis of having a four-year degree,
he ended up in a highly paid position in construction.
I think there is definitely a missing variable. That variable is the individual’s will. The individual’s work ethic, desire, and self reliance will have a lot to do with their “return.”
As an example, I will use my daughter and son in law. They both have MFAs. They are both working artists. They work their tails off.
My daughter is an art teacher for several studios and has done several classes for the VA. She is just starting “creating” for her gallery and is turning a profit—albeit small.
Her husband has 2 MFAs. His work is in metal. He was selected as one of the top artists in the US, and recently one of the top 100 in the world.
He is also a professor.
Within the last six months, they’s made enough to cover their living expenses for years. He knows it could change tomorrow, so he is learning how to invest.
Hard work and a clear “vision” of how to be successful is something they do not teach in Pro level art education. They certainly do not teach business or tax implications of working with galleries, agents, and what not.
Are they the “norm?” Nope. But they also did not fall into the “Woke” crap that the rest of their peers fell into. Sclupting penises and vagina’s might be “edgy” for art shows. They don’t sell in the real world. These kids avoided that stuff like the plague.
Anything outside the hard science majors is not a good ROI.
H-1B visas took the luster off of majoring in STEM. H1-b visas are pure evil in every way.
“Anything outside the hard science majors is not a good ROI.”
What about business-related majors?
I took a $2600 10-month course back in 1982 that got me a six-figure job and very satisfying career from which I just retired a few months ago.
With the exception of stem, I don’t see colleges really being all that valuable regarding income level. And even with stem, if you don’t have a natural interest and aptitude in your field, it really won’t pay that much. Two of the computer programmers I worked with we’re educated in college and used to be chemists. Both of them went into computer programming, which doesn’t require a degree, because it paid a lot more.
Even if you did poorly in Uni, you were at least taught how to analyze and think about a problem. Basic stuff, so basic a 4-yr old (or dog) gets it.
But, modern “liberal arts” Uni’s now only teach what to think, ideology. That is why such a degree is worthless.
Those numbers are terrible. An ISTA packaging technician does much better than that.
If you are going for a degree in your field of employment, you need a masters degree. It will pay for itself. A liberal arts degree is only useful if you have the talent to be a star. If you don’t, it’s worthless.
STEM graduates will always have jobs.
We need to YANK the Education Establishment in the same way that President Eisenhower yanked the Military-Industrial Complex in 1960. The analogs are multiple between the two, separated as they are by 62 years. Both ride on ‘free money’ from the government/taxpayers, neither is held to account for over-spending, each has fervent partisans and lobbyists to feed an ever increasing appetite.
In post WW2 education, higher education had a firm syllabus depending upon the academic major sought. Changes were driven by real events, like physics moving from an Einstein view to quantum theory. While the GI Bill near-flooded the institutions, those Veterans were nothing like todays students as they were goal-oriented.
For me, it appears that the change did start in the 1960s and derived from the two drivers of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War & its resistance. I believe that Academia naturally attracts ‘users’ over ‘doers’ and as such is inclined to the LEFT in the political spectrum. Thus in the Kennedy-Johnson era, these higher-education institutions moved massively into social sciences and support of their allied groups from outside. From that start, this Education Establishment became a safe haven for Vietnam resistors, advocates of ever increasing civil & social rights and the breeding ground for future educators and LEFTists of the same views.
When, in 1979, with a stroke of his pen, President Carter separated Education from its old structure of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) into its current singular US Cabinet Secretariat of ‘The Department of Education’, the Education Establishment got its Pentagon equivalent with control over and funding for ‘E’ducation! From this and prior actions, a REAL COMPLEX is born that more than equals Eisenhower’s bogeyman.
Now these schools get multiple sources of money and, in what would surprise & dismay earlier educators, have become consumer-driven education cafeterias. All high schoolers are expected to come, thus guaranteeing a new crop every year. The School has no responsibility for successful outcome but gets government money for each but in a seat (except some like Hillsdale & Grove City!). Competition lags for academics but is rampant for sports and social(ism) activity.
Gads what a mess I/we are leaving to these who follow us. My prayer is to GOD to help them as they will surely need it!
Please tell me it was Control Data Institute :)
Tomorrow... Tomorrow... Tomorrow...
Today’s youth should look at tech schools. Learn how to be a machinist, electrician, welder or HVAC technician. These skills are in high demand and pay very well.
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