Posted on 05/27/2014 6:40:14 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Some newly minted college graduates struggle to find work. Others accept jobs for which they feel overqualified. Student debt, meanwhile, has topped $1 trillion.
It’s enough to create a wave of questions about whether a college education is still worth it.
A new set of income statistics answers those questions quite clearly: Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.
The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Besides, it keeps countless college students off the unemployment rolls and makes Hussein's [FAKE] stats look better.
"Made" 98% more. And went 100k+ into debt. What does that work out to?
I think it is worth it if you don’t go to trade school, open your own business or join the military. If you try to work with just a high school diploma, I think the road you have will be much harder than someone with a degree. Again unless you want to be a Professor or only want a Bachelors, stay way from the psychology, sociology, woman’s studies, etc. degrees.
Only because a USA college degree is worth a little more than a high school diploma was 50 years ago.
Is college worth it? How many of this year’s college graduates had a job waiting for them that’s not at a Starbucks, Target, or at other retail outlets.
Maybe in monetary value, but college students are more likely to receive an indoctrination than an education in 21st century America.
Study sponsored by the American university system?
Great point. And that borrowed money goes into whose pocket? The push for a college degree is a money making scam. This article further perpetuates that scam. I don't believe the 98% figure either.
NYT? Sorry, not worth reading. Math is most definitely not the friend of any MSM jokester-journalist....as has been amply demonstrated by them buying the Obamadork collection O’Clowns’ claims on 1) the economy, 2) unemployment, 3) Obamacare, 4) the VA, 5) Benghazi, 6) the so-called melting in Antartica (when ice amounts are actually at record levels), and so on.
Ain’t buyin’ it, NYT. College is a reasonable gamble for techno-types, and not a bad bet for those lib arts folks who actually studied something above third grade level. But, for the vast majority of the clowns emerging from our institutions of politically correct indoctrination, their borrowed money could just as well have been thrown into the street.
This is the biggest load of s___t out there. The more I see, the more I am convinced that college isn’t worth it. It is completely overpriced and churns out kids who know nothing. Now going to the right college and taking the right major is definitely worth it. But simply “going to college”, taking a major that you really don’t understand and that is not marketable, and then drinking your way thoguth college, is pointless.
For a liberal arts degree? Sitting in mom's basement wearing onesies PJs, drinking hot chocolate and discussing getting health insurance.
High school grad choices:
A) Go to a trade school. Become a plumber. Make $30/hour and have a constant supply of work.
B) Go to college. Rack up $100K in debt. Receive liberal indoctrination. Try to fnd someone who will find use for your degree in Political Science. Become a US Senator for 3 weeks when you are nominated as the Democrat candidate for POTUS. Become POTUS.
See? The Obama “no experience needed” plan can work for everyone.
I went from working god awful hours in a bakery with split days off to doing engineering work in an office behind a computer Monday - Friday and weekends off. Sure, I’ve got student loans. But I also make more, own a house and actually have a life. My loans can be a drag sometimes, but they will eventually get paid off. And my life now is 10 times better than it was. But I also thought about where a good market was at and didn’t just go to college for the sake of it and waste a bunch of time and money.
Because most employers have drunk the Kool-Aid and actually believe that colleges turn out fully prepared, plug-and-play employees requiring zero employer-paid cost for training.
The research does seem to take into account the debt load, but I’m still skeptical. I’d wager there is some massaging going on of realistic salaries.
Also, even if this were accurate today (which I doubt), tuition is way outstripping GDP right now. Salaries are most certainly not. Therefore, it’s extremely likely that the value of a college education is going down, down, down.
A document now trumps actual skills. For instance, many sales jobs now require college degrees. College is not required to sell products. People skills, smarts and personality is what is required. Things that certainly are not taught at a university. Yet someone possessing those skills is rejected because they don't have that participation trophy called a degree.
Exactly. I was writing #18 while you posted #16. We are on the same page.
I'm in IT - I do a lot of hiring. At best, a degree is a checkbox: "Yup. They've got it." Tells me that the person is able to stick with something for 4 years and see it to completion.
That's all, nothing else. I'm more interested in what people have done - I've got a right good number of people on my team with no degree at all...they got their OJT in the military. But then, IT is a different animal. Results count. In "soft" work like HR and Marketing, not so much.
However, others - particularly in HR - think that a degree confers some sort of magical powers. Why? I dunno. All I know is that I've got a BS in Electrical Engineering, and HR wonks eyes pop when I tell them that. It's fine with me, and I don't emphasize that I earned it 20-odd years ago, and have rarely used it since then. :-)
And don't get me started on 24-year-old kids walking out of State U with an MBA and no experience, who don't understand why they can't have a $200K job and a corner office, yet.
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