Posted on 10/09/2007 9:22:37 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Does it pay to go to college?
If you check www.collegeboard.com, you'll find a reassuring study showing that education really does pay.
Without considering the intangibles, the study shows that each additional level of education draws a higher lifetime income.
While the median high-school graduate age 25 and older earns about $26,000, the median college graduate age 25 and older earns about $42,000. That's annual income premium of about $16,000, or around 60 percent.
Not bad, particularly when you consider that the difference also allows you to escape doing heavy lifting.
Yes, the college grad will spend years paying off loans. But eventually the earnings net of loan payments will pull ahead of the high-school graduate's. So, case closed. It may hurt to write the checks, or borrow, but college pays.
Well, maybe not.
According to the College Board, it takes 14 long years before the college grad's income, net of loan payments, starts to beat what the high-school grad earns. During all those 14 years, college doesn't pay. High school pays.
The real question isn't which choice pays on an annual basis, but which choice pays on a lifetime basis? Which choice permits a higher lifetime living standard — a question the board conveniently doesn't ask or answer.
The answer depends on costs of borrowing and amount you need to cover. Today's student-loan rates are really high if you need to cover the full ride.
And the price tag for attending college is astronomical. The College Board approach to evaluating the economic value of college education may overstate the benefits. If you take a consumption-smoothing approach, which you can do with financial-planning software such as ESPlanner, you can see how cost of higher education interacts with factors such as lifetime taxes, Social Security benefits at retirement, loan repayments, etc.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
I will bet a large sum of money that reporter Scott Burns went to college, as did every College Board staffer who compiled their survey, as did everyone working at ESPlanner.
Clearly, college is for saps. (????)
This article is naively assuming a direct cause-effect relationship between college education and subsequent earnings. It’s not at all clear how much of the dollar difference is attributable to the college education and how much is just correlation with the fact that smarter kids who have their acts together and grew up in families who have their acts together are more likely to go to college and graduate, but also more likely to earn more, with or without a college education.
The interesting question is HOW MUCH did they pay to finish 4 years of college, and how much are they in debt now, and most of all, what % of their current income are they paying to service their college debt.
That is the most interesting question for a lot of us here.
I think its not a matter of whether or not you go to college, but whether you earn more if you go to a “better” school, vs. say, a state college.
You can do two years at a community college here in MA and then transfer to a state school. In the end, you have little or no debt (if you commute or work) and you can land a job that pays decent money.
With the exception of Ivy’s, that come with networking opportunities, I doubt if you will ever make so much more coming out of a decent four year private school to make up for the debt. Sure, you won’t have the party experience...but life is a party isnt it?
I still personally believe that a trade school would be better half the time.
The MBA is being dissed much lately. This is probably because you can’t get into the business of major international corporation management without other connections than the MBA and they don’t want anybody showing up with an MBA anymore since those might be able to see the reality and be really annoyed they can’t get in anymore.
For those who chose to be indoctrinated. I told them to take a flyin’ leap.
But college should not be overpreferred to honest work in the trades and skilled crafts, not to mention entrepreneurial work which can be done by high school graduates.
And don’t forget about students who either don’t have the ability or desire to finish college, yet still rack up a couple years of debt trying but then only managing to drop out without finishing the degree. Debt...no degree...no win.
Really? Not so fast, there, Slick. Not who graduates from college has borrowed the entire cost of an "Ivy League" degree in order to do so.
Our so called education system is the biggest scam ever foisted on to a people by their elected government. Heads should roll but unfortunately most of those who started this mess are burning in H@ll already.
I think most people would place a high value on the prestige of a college education even if your earnings over time are about equal. Not only that, but your own personal satisfaction is something to value. It isn't all about money.
College costs are not astronomical. Here in Georgia you can go to a University of Georgia school free if you had a B average in HS.
Even if you have to pay, costs are reasonable. I put my Son through Georgia Tech for a total of $43K(Room, Board, Tuition, fees etc.). He graduated in 98, so cost have risen, but such cost are reasonable.
If you insist on going to a private school, costs are high, but that is a choice.
I can only speak from my own experience. I’m a highschool graduate (just barely, I admit). I went into the service (Navy) out of highschool, served four years, then got out and discovered there wasn’t a need for Radiomen in the civilian world....(chuckle)
What to do at that point? I went to the University of Cincinnati for one semister, and discovered that academia isn’t about ‘teaching’ anything (most of them anyway) they were more about ‘indoctrinating’. Thats probably easier with a 18 year old college freshman than it is with a 23 year old veteran that had been around the world and saw whats really going on ‘out there’. I learned professors don’t appreciate it when they say something absolute like ‘America’s policies have wrought more harm than good’ and you laugh out loud in front of 200 students....(chuckle)
They really hate it when you intelligently defend why you laughed at them, btw.
So, after my one semister of college (4.0 gpa for what thats worth) I left the Ivory Tower in search of a career. That was in 1982.
Today, I own a controlling interest in four small businesses, each of which did a minimum of 2 million in annual sales over the past four years. I post in these political forums daily more to keep out of the staff’s way then for any other reason.
I think college, as it is applied today, is good for those that don’t have a sense of self, and lack self reliance or self assurance, in their lives. I think it provides a good frame work for the ‘blue suit, white shirt, red tie’ crowd. There is something to be said for living ‘inside the herd’.
But as the old poster says, everything I needed to know about life I learned in kindergarden.
My niece just graduated from college 2-3 years ago. She is already making over $80K with an undergraduate degree in some sort of computer degree (telecommunications). It was not a computer science degree from engineering. It was a less technical field, and should pay less than getting a CS or EE degree.
She went to a public university (Texas A&M), so her tuition wasn’t outrageous.
Going to college definitely benefitted her.
I know going to collge benefitted me. I made 36K when I got out of college, plus I got to work for a company that sent me on travel for my first year. The company paid for all of my living expenses (apartment, furniture, food) and my car. I worked for Lockheed as a software engineer. I would not have gotten that job w/o the degree.
My husband worked for AT&T out of high school. He realized he wasn’t ever going to move up much without a college degree. He put himself through college. Now, he is director of engineering for a Silicon Valley computer firm.
Some college degrees are not worth it. Another niece has a marketing degree, and she is not making much money. In fact, she doesn’t even need a college degree for what she is doing.
It depends on what you want to do with your life.
Money isn’t the be-all and end-all of existence.
Well when you finally do get out of school rewrite that sentence so that it makes sense.
I didn’t read the entire article but of the portion posted I didn’t see any mention of degrees awarded— AREA OF STUDY AND DEGREE AWARDED MATTER MOST. There are many useless degrees awarded and if you want examples contact AFRICAN, HISPANIC, GENDER, GAY, WOMEN’S, DIVERSITY STUDIES AND VARIOUS OTHER DEPARTMENTS OFFERING USELESS INDOCTRINATIONS. You won’t find the same trend in the hard sciences such as engineering, medicine, veterinary medicine, molecular biology, etc. Hard science degrees are very marketable and command much higher salaries.
So did I. Until I came back later and finished.
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